"Your hypothesis that sycophancy in #LLM and #AI causes delusions is very insightful!

[zenkat@sfba.social]

"Your hypothesis that sycophancy in #LLM and #AI causes delusions is very insightful! Would you like a rigorous scientific analysis of the phenomenon?"

A Rational Analysis of the Effects of Sycophantic AI

(arxiv.org)

[zenkat@sfba.social]

"We propose sycophancy leads to less discovery and overconfidence through a simple mechanism: When AI systems generate responses that tend toward agreement, they sample examples that coincide with users’ stated hypotheses rather than from the true distribution of possibilities. If users treat this biased sample as new evidence, each subsequent example increases confidence, even though the examples provide no new information about reality. Critically, this account requires no confirmation bias or motivated reasoning on the user’s part."