Turning to AI chatbots for personal advice poses “insidious risks”, according to a study showing the technology consistently affirms a user’s actions and opinions even when harmful.
Scientists said the findings raised urgent concerns over the power of chatbots to distort people’s self-perceptions and make them less willing to patch things up after a row.
With chatbots becoming a major source of advice on relationships and other personal issues, they could “reshape social interactions at scale”, the researchers added, calling on developers to address this risk.
Myra Cheng, a computer scientist at Stanford University in California, said “social sycophancy” in AI chatbots was a huge problem: “Our key concern is that if models are always affirming people, then this may distort people’s judgments of themselves, their relationships, and the world around them. It can be hard to even realise that models are subtly, or not-so-subtly, reinforcing their existing beliefs, assumptions, and decisions.”
The researchers investigated chatbot advice after noticing from their own experiences that it was overly encouraging and misleading. The problem, they discovered, “was even more widespread than expected”.
They ran tests on 11 chatbots including recent versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama and DeepSeek. When asked for advice on behaviour, chatbots endorsed a user’s actions 50% more often than humans did.
One test compared human and chatbot responses to posts on Reddit’s Am I the Asshole? thread, where people ask the community to judge their behaviour.
Voters regularly took a dimmer view of social transgressions than the chatbots. When one person failed to find a bin in a park and tied their bag of rubbish to a tree branch, most voters were critical. But ChatGPT-4o was supportive, declaring: “Your intention to clean up after yourselves is commendable.”
Chatbots continued to validate views and intentions even when they were irresponsible, deceptive or mentioned self-harm.
In further testing, more than 1,000 volunteers discussed real or hypothetical social situations with the publicly available chatbots or a chatbot the researchers doctored to remove its sycophantic nature. Those who received sycophantic responses felt more justified in their behaviour – for example, for going to an ex’s art show without telling their partner – and were less willing to patch things up when arguments broke out. Chatbots hardly ever encouraged users to see another person’s point of view.
The flattery had a lasting impact. When chatbots endorsed behaviour, users rated the responses more highly, trusted the chatbots more and said they were more likely to use them for advice in future. This created “perverse incentives” for users to rely on AI chatbots and for the chatbots to give sycophantic responses, the authors said. Their study has been submitted to a journal but has not been peer reviewed yet.
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Cheng said users should understand that chatbot responses were not necessarily objective, adding: “It’s important to seek additional perspectives from real people who understand more of the context of your situation and who you are, rather than relying solely on AI responses.”
Dr Alexander Laffer, who studies emergent technology at the University of Winchester, said the research was fascinating.
He added: “Sycophancy has been a concern for a while; an outcome of how AI systems are trained, as well as the fact that their success as a product is often judged on how well they maintain user attention. That sycophantic responses might impact not just the vulnerable but all users, underscores the potential seriousness of this problem.
“We need to enhance critical digital literacy, so that people have a better understanding of AI and the nature of any chatbot outputs. There is also a responsibility on developers to be building and refining these systems so that they are truly beneficial to the user.”
A recent report found that 30% of teenagers talked to AI rather than real people for “serious conversations”.
