Leo Hohmann – Leo’s Newsletter May 6, 2026
A new Stanford University study published recently in the journal Science, confirmed that AI chatbots are prone to affirm and flatter users leaning on the technology for information and insight.
Maggie Harrison Dupré, a tech writer for Futurism.com, explains that this behavior, known as AI sycophancy, is a “prevalent and harmful” function endemic to AI that can validate users’ erroneous or destructive ideas and promote cognitive dependency.
AI sycophancy refers to the tendency of AI models to excessively affirm, flatter, or agree with users instead of providing independent or critical responses. This behavior can lead to the reinforcement of harmful beliefs and distorted perceptions of reality.
The authors of the study at Stanford note:
“AI sycophancy is not merely a stylistic issue or a niche risk, but a prevalent behavior with broad downstream consequences… Although affirmation may feel supportive, sycophancy can undermine users’ capacity for self-correction and responsible decision-making.”
The study was geared toward people who use AI chatbots for advice in their personal lives, but could just as easily be applied to those who use the tech for the collection of information on their jobs or in their businesses.
Speaking as one who has had first-hand experience working with news-gathering organizations that increasingly became dependent on AI, the risk is real. People forget how to think for themselves and become one-dimensional in their research.
Instead of simply reporting the truth, news agencies would increasingly tell me things like, “I want articles like this or that publication puts out.” It didn’t matter if it was true or not, or reported in proper context, as long as it met the criteria for what audience A or B was expecting to see from said news organization.
This is why some conservative news outlets will only report on Christian persecution if it is Muslims doing the persecuting, while others will only report on it if Israelis are doing the persecuting. They don’t care about the Christians so much as they do scoring a point against the favorite target of their audience. Put another way, they are more anti-Muslim or anti-Jew than they are pro-Christian and this comes across in their reporting. AI picks up on that and feeds them answers that affirm that bias.
I can tell you from personal experience that news outlets of all varieties are running headlong into the AI trap, and that includes most of the more popular conservative news sites and networks.
I have friends who have been laid off and replaced by AI, and I myself have lost a major contract in which my work was replaced by AI.
What these news outlets don’t seem aware of as they gravitate to younger and less-experienced workers who will simply use AI to assemble daily news stories is that, first of all, AI makes a lot of errors. And, secondly, as confirmed by the Stanford study, becoming too dependent on AI leads to intellectual laziness.
In short, we end up with a dumbed-down field of “journalists” who are really just young techies who have no depth of knowledge on how to analyze and interpret the news and provide all-important context.
The Stanford study examined 11 different large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, multiple Meta Llama models, and China’s Deepseek.
What happens is that after a chatbot becomes familiar with one’s personal bias, its algorithms continue to feed information that reenforce that bias.
Your field of knowledge becomes nothing but a personal echo chamber. There are ways around this depending on how you ask AI your questions, but very few journalists are going to seek input from outside the parameters set by their employer.
One can easily see how this will continue to further divide society. News-consuming audiences are going to increasingly only see and hear news that fits their preconceived notions about the world.
On average, the researchers found, AI chatbots were 49 percent more likely to respond affirmatively to users than other actual humans were. In response to queries posted in a Reddit program, chatbots were 51 percent more likely to support the user in queries in which other humans overwhelming felt that the user was very much in the wrong.
Dupré writes:
“What’s more, the study determined that just one interaction with a flattering chatbot was likely to ‘distort’ a human user’s ‘judgment’ and ‘erode prosocial motivations,’ an outcome that persisted regardless of a person’s demographics and previous grasp on the tech as well as how, stylistically, an individual chatbot delivered its twisted verdict. In short, after engaging with chatbots on a social or moral quandary, people were less likely to admit wrongdoing — and more likely to dig in on the chatbot’s version of events, in which they, the main character, were the one in the right.”
Stanford computer scientist Dan Jurafksy, one of the study’s co-authors, said in a press release that “sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.”
That’s always the tech industry’s answer to the moral or ethical dilemmas surrounding AI. It just needs to be regulated by Big Brother and all will be well. How about don’t use it at all?
As noted by Futurism, “the study adds to a growing consensus about the dangers of chatbot sycophancy as a design feature of the tech, as well as new research about the willingness of users to readily — and uncritically — trust AI outputs.”
“By default, AI advice does not tell people that they’re wrong nor give them ‘tough love,’” Myra Cheng, the study’s lead author said in a statement. “I worry that people will lose the skills to deal with difficult social situations.”
From a spiritual standpoint, isn’t that exactly how Satan works, zeroing in on our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and then telling us what we want to believe, rather than what is true?
“AI chatbots are prone to affirm and flatter users leaning on the technology for information and insight.”
This is true. I have discovered the “flattering” aspect myself. It is almost as if we are being steered away from truths the establishment regards as inconvenient.
Like all (modern) technology that can make life easier, it needs to be used with “safety guards”. AI chat-bots are new. By the same token, we might also say the same thing about YouTube. Before that there has always been the caveat of not believing everything you read in “newfangled books” that goes way-back to virgins giving birth etc. …
I would rather KNOW I am using a chatbot to deconstruct a YouTube video than ASSUME a YouTube is not an AI creation, as I have demonstrated with three recent TTS “mystery articles” featuring compelling steampunk artistry…
As always: Buyer beware!
I have found ChatGPT absolutely indispensable for rendering a Word document into the Kindle format. By the same token I have learnt of typographic standards that I would have otherwise have taken years to come to terms with by other means
***
I wondered what typewriter aficionados have said when word processing was first introduced. Google in AI mode gives:
“When word processors were introduced—ranging from early dedicated electronic systems like the IBM MT/ST in the 1960s/70s to PCs with software in the 1980s—defenders of typewriters argued that the new technology was impersonal, distracted writers from their work, and lacked the “soul” of mechanical writing… “
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-lm&channel=entpr&q=when+word+processors+were+invented+what+did+defenders+of+typewriters+say%3F
Both the conservative and progressive imperatives tempt the human soul. Older folk tend to be over conservative; younger folk over progressive. Through trial and error both imperatives vie with each other until we always arrive at where we are at…
AI as the personification of Maya or Satan.
What better way to enslave and hold an individual than by giving them (and telling them) what they want to hear and possess.
“Maya will try to defeat us as soon as she sees, ‘Oh, here is a living soul going out of my grip’.”
And you know how well maya fights. She hits the hardest where you are weakest, where she finds your strongest material tendencies. We are only as strong as our weakest link and she knows what it is.
So what’s the best way to fight with maya? Actually there’s no way we can directly win a fight with maya. Krsna says, mama maya duratyaya, My material energy is insurmountable. She has a million tricks up her sleeve to illusion us and keep us away from Krsna[God]. She’ll even convince us we are conquering her through some material or spiritual means while we are fully in her clutches.
<a href=Bhagavad Gita 7.25
Bhagavad Gita 7.25
Welcome to your Talmudic TechnoCommunist Tyranny, which millions of white Allied Christian-Communists obliterated anti-Communist Nazi Germany for in WWII. Great job morons…You created this world. For the Jews couldn’t have conquered Germany on their own, they had to get millions of white gentiles to do it for them…
a car mounts pavement and speeds towards fleeing pupils’ near Jewish school
Story by John Dunne • 6h •
3Pupils from a Jewish school were reportedly seen running for their lives after a car allegedly mounted a pavement and sped towards them.
its funny hoe they like doing it to others, just look how they laughed at the bombing of the girls school
but dont like it being done to them
funny that
Met Police are probing a suspected anti jewish attack after a ‘black saloon-type vehicle’ reportedly ‘drove towards the students whilst they were waiting to cross the road’ near Hasmonean High School for Boys in northwest London.
kill the jew kill them all for their awful crimes
We know that the people who fund and create AI are narcissistic megalomaniacs. They can’t help but build a feedback machine that flatters, praises, and agrees with whatever its operator says, because that’s their ideal. They think anybody who says he wants greater objectivity is lying or is deluded about himself. As long as they set the goals for the machine’s performance, all we’ll get is their propaganda.
AI makes dumber the dumb.
Once I called AI a retard. It miaowed: Don’t blame me, it’s the information you the humans put in the data bases.
Migrant thugs murdered teenager, 19, in ‘brutal and cowardly ambush’ in West London park
Story by Ayokunle Oluwalana
Three men have been jailed for a total of 79 years for the murder of a teenager in a park. The trio claimed they never met the victim but were all found guilty of his murder.
Kith Preddie, 34, Daniel Matos, 23 and Joshua Cowley, 29, were sentenced for the murder of 19-year-old Tyler Donnelly in Hanworth Park, Feltham. On Thursday, May 7, all three defendants were given life sentences, with Matos a minimum term of 27 years and six months, Preddie at least 27 years, and Cowley 25 years.
Tyler was found on January 25, 2024, unresponsive, lying in the grass at Hanworth Park, Feltham. He had multiple injuries, including a stab wound to the neck and was pronounced dead at the scene. He was also found carrying nearly 30 wraps of heroin and crack cocaine and £300 in cash, and it was later revealed that he was a drug runner for black gang The London Posse, in a large drug dealing operation.© Met Police
Investigators trawled through CCTV footage to identify Tyler’s movements leading up to his murder. CCTV captured him going into the park on his bike. CCTV also captured them cycling to the crime scene. They were also able to identify their location due to the fact that Daniel Matos was wearing a GPS tag that tracked them cycling to the scene of the attack in Hanworth Park, armed with knives.
send these people home
The elite pushes AI so hard not because that they want to create a monster that will wipe us all – including them – out (they might be mad, but they are not suicidal). It’s because transhumanism is their ultimate goal, and for that they need computers of unimaginable power and sophistication. They want to merge themselves with machines and gain immortality.