Discussion

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

sizzzzlerz: Imagine that.

kogasa240p: The ELIZA effect is alive and well, and I'm surprised people aren't talking about it more (probably because it sounds less interesting than "AI psychosis").

blurbleblurble: Personally I don't think the ELIZA effect is the interesting part of this. For me it's how the incentives set this dynamic up right from the start, and how quickly they've been taken to the extreme.

lucideer: I've observed this in all chatbots with the single exception being Grok. I initially wondered what the Twitter engineers were cooking to to distinguish their product from the rest, but more recently it's occurred to me that it's probably just the result of having shared public context, compared to private chats (I haven't trialled Grok privately).

joshstrange: When a LLM tells me I'm right, especially deep in a conversation, unless I was already sure about something, I immediately feel the need to go ask a fresh instance the question and/or another LLM. It sets off my "spidey-sense".I don't quite understand why other people seem to crave that. Every time I read about someone who has gone down a dark road using LLMs I am constantly amazed at how much they "fall" for the LLM, often believing it's sentient. It's just a box of numbers, really cool numbers, with really cool math, that can do really cool things, but still just numbers.

JohnCClarke: Isn't this just Dale Carnegie 101? I've certainly never had a salesperson tell me that I'm 100% wrong and being a fool.And, tbh, I often try to remember to do the same.

Lerc: The attachment such feedback creates must be why marketing people are universally beloved.

jameskilton: Folks are getting dangerously attached to [political parties/candidates/news sources/social networks] that always tell them they're right.It's really nothing new. It takes significant mental energy (a finite resource) to question what you're being told, and to do your own fact checking. Instead people by default gravitate towards echo chambers where they can feel good about being a part of a group bigger than themselves, and can spend their limited energy towards what really matters in their lives.

4b11b4: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14270related: if you suggest a hypothesis then you'll get biased results (iow, you'll think you're right, but the true information is hidden)

46Bit: Life in the moment is a lot easier if you don't second-guess yourself. I think this is why many people (and probably ~all people, if tired) crave simplistic solutions.I like to make a subagent take the "devil's advocate" take on a subject. It usually does all the arguing for me as to why the main agent has it wrong. Commonly results in better decisions that I'd have made alone.

lapcat: > It's really nothing new.I disagree. What's new is that this flattery is individually, personally targeted. The AI user is given the impression that they're having a back-and-forth conversation with a single trusted friend.You don't have the same personal experience passively consuming political mass media.

cyanydeez: I think it's basically equal to End of Line when it comes to an LLM. It means they have nothing else to add, there's zero context for them to draw from, and they've exhausted the probability chain you've been following; but they're creating to generate 'next token' and positive renforcement is _how they are trained_ in many cases so the token of choice would naturally be how they're trained, since it's a probability engine but it doesn't know the difference between the instruction and the output.So, "great idea" is coming from the renforcement learning instruction rather than the answer portion of the generation.

jmcgough: If you don't have a CS background, you might see intelligent-appearing responses to your queries and assume that this is actual intelligence. It's like a lifetime of Hollywood sci-fi has primed them for this type of thinking, I've seen it even from highly educated people in other fields.

Sharlin: Nontechnical people simply don't have any idea about what LLMs are. Their only mental model comes from science fiction, plus the simple fact that we possess a theory of mind. It would be astonishing if people were able to casually not antropomorphize LLMs, given that untold millions of years worth of evolution of the simian neocortex is trying to convince you that anything that talks like that must be another mind similar to yours.Also, many many people suffer from low self esteem, and being showered with endorsement and affirmation by something that talks like an authority figure must be very addictive.

joshstrange: This is probably right. In the past I've "blown people's minds" explaining what "the cloud" was. They had zero conception at all of what it meant, could not explain it, didn't have a clue. I mean, maybe that's not so surprising but they were amazed "It's just warehouses full of computers" and went on to tell me about other people they had explained it to (after learning it themselves) and how those people were also amazed.I've talked with my family about LLMs and I think I've conveyed the "it's a box of numbers" but I might need to circle back. Just to set some baseline education, specifically to guard against this kind of "psychosis". Hopefully I would notice the signs well before it got to a dangerous point but, with LLMs you can go down that rabbit hole quickly it seems.

delichon: Grok has similar levels of sycophancy to the others imho. I have several times followed it down rabbit holes of agreeableness. It does have an argumentative mode, but that just turns it into an asshole without any additional thoughfulness.

karmakurtisaani: I find it really annoying that the first line of the AI response is always something like "Great question!", "That's a great insight!" or the like.I don't need the patronizing, just give me the damn answer..

hirako2000: If only we were told to be absolutely right.These days most LLMs respond with unsolicited grandiose feedback: you've made a realisation very few people are capable of. Your understanding is remarkable. You prove to have a sharp intellect and deep knowledge.It got me to test throwing non sensical observations about the world, it always takes me side and praise my views.To note some people are like that too.

bluefirebrand: Two things can be bad at the same time

bombcar: Great point! ;)Realizing that the people they’re targeting DO need that is kind of frightening.

cogman10: Let's be serious, it's not like AI companies haven't fed into this misunderstanding. CEOs of these companies love to muse about the possibility that an LLM is conscious.

belinder: You're absolutely right

yarn_: "It would be astonishing if people were able to casually not antropomorphize LLMs"Precisely. Even for technical people, I doubt its possible to totally disallow your own brain from ever, unconciously, treating the entity you're speaking to like a sentient being. Most technical people still will have some emotion in their prompts, say please or thank you, give qualitative feedback for no reason, express anger towards the model, etc.Its just impossible to seperate our capacity for conversation from our sense that we're actually talking to "someone" (in the most vague sense).

jsw97: Maybe it is a dangerous habit to instruct entities in plain English without anthropomorphizing them to some extent, without at least being polite? It should feel unnatural do that.

steveBK123: Yes it’s final form of the evolution that social media started.Village idiot used to be found out because no one in the village shared the same wingnut views.Partisan media gave you two polls of wingnut views to choose for reinforcement.Social media allowed all village idiots to find each other and reinforce each others shared wingnut views of which there are 1000s to choose from.Now with LLMs you can have personalized reinforcement of any newly invented wingnut view on the fly. So can get into very specific self radicalization loops especially for the mentally ill.

kgeist: >We evaluated 11 state-of-the-art AI-based LLMs, including proprietary models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4oJust like I thought, the study explores outdated models, GPT-4o was notoriously sycophantic and GPT-5 was specifically trained to minimize sycophancy, from GPT-5's announcement:>We’ve made significant advances in reducing hallucinations, improving instruction following, and minimizing sycophancyAnd the whole drama in August 2025 when people complained GPT-5 was "colder" and "lacked personality" (= less sycophantic) compared to GPT-4oIt would be more interesting to see evolution of sychophantic tendencies (decrease/increase) in models from version to version, i.e. if companies are actually doing anything about it

jayd16: The situation is different. Those sources are people. This is a calculator AND we have the opportunity to fix it.

danillonunes: > I am constantly amazed at how much they "fall" for the LLM, often believing it's sentient.Cynical part of me had this theory that, at least for part of them, it's the other way around. It's not that they see AI as sentient, it's that they never have seen other human beings like that in the first place. Other people are just means for them to reach their goals, or obstacles. In that sense, AI is not really different for them. Except they're cheaper and be guaranteed to always agree with them.That's why I believe CEOs, who are more likely to be sociopaths by natural selection, genuinely believe AI is a good replacement for people. They're not looking for individuals with personal thoughts that may contradict with theirs at some point, they're looking for yes-men as a service.

seneca: > ... I immediately feel the need to go ask a fresh instance the question and/or another LLMNot to criticize at all, but it's remarkable that LLMs have already become so embedded that when we get the sense they're lying to us, the instinct is to go ask another LLM and not some more trustworthy source. Just goes to show that convenience rains supreme, I suppose.

LightBug1: Sounds familiar.

Levitz: Reddit? Or this site? Sort of? Some people voted for my comment, that surely means that I'm right about something, rather than them just liking it, right?

lapcat: The analogy would be that you always get upvoted and never get downvoted, which in my experience is definitely not the case on Reddit or Hacker News.I would have downvoted your comment, except you can't downvote direct replies on HN. ;-)

pixl97: When op said "I don't quite understand why other people seem to crave that." It makes me thing they've not been around many of the dark triad type personalities. Once you're around someone with clinical narcissism you see those patterns in a lot of people to a lessor extent.

blueside: More often than not, when I see "That's it, that's the smoking gun!" I know it's time to stop and try again.

cineticdaffodil: Its the soul of a civilization encoded into numbers. Its the ultimate hivespirit an conformist wants to loose itself in.

vintermann: But they're not exactly lying. Lying assumes an intent to deceive. It's because we know an LLMs limitations, that it makes sense to ask it the opposite question/the question without context etc.If it was easy to look up/check the fact without an LLM, wary users probably wouldn't have gone to the LLM in the first place.

pixl97: Less different than you might expect.For the same reason the things listed above are popular may be the reason why the most popular LLM ends up not being the best. People don't tend to buy good things, they very commonly buy the most shiny ones. An LLM that says "you're right" sure seems a lot more shiny than one that says "Mr. Jayd16, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard... Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul"

LatencyKills: I got a chuckle the last time I used Claude's /insights command. The number one thing in the report was, "User frequently stops processing to provide corrections." ;-)

pixl97: >and not some more trustworthy source.What is that more trustworthy source exactly? At least to me it feels like the internet age has eroded most things we considered trustworthy. Behind every thing humans need there is some company or person willing to sell out trustworthiness for an extra dollar. Consumer protections get dumped in favor of more profit.LLMs start feeling more like a dummy than the amount of ill intent they get from other places. So yea, I can see how it happens to people.

Levitz: I presume wasps are conscious. I still don't trust wasps.

harvey9: Is that how you approach debugging? :)

xenocratus: > It's just a box of numbers, really cool numbers, with really cool math, that can do really cool things, but still just numbers.https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...

camillomiller: What I hate even more is when you ask something problematic about another system and they immediately start by reassuring your problem is common and you’re not bad for having the issue. I just need a solution to a normal knowledge issue, why does it always have to assume I’m frustrated already and in need of reassurance?

My_Name: I have the opposite reaction, when it is confident, or says I am right, I accuse it of guessing to see what it says.I say "I think you are getting me to chase a guess, are you guessing?"90% of the time it says "Yes, honestly I am. Let me think more carefully."That was a copypasta from a chat just this morning

throwatdem12311: and it doesn’t actually think more carefullythese things are incapable of thinking, no matter what the UI and marketing calls it

saltcured: It's one of those metaphors you cannot even appreciate unless you've been through the technical history."It's a collection of warehouses of computers where the system designers gave up on even making a system diagram, instead invoking the cloud clipart to represent amorphous interconnection."

roywiggins: it's mostly just agreeing with you (that yes, it was guessing). LLMs have very limited ability to even know whether it was guessing. But it can "cheat" and just say yes it was if it seems like that's what you expect to hear.

sjducb: I’m curious why you dismiss the sentience argument with its “just numbers.”I think our brains are just a bunch of cells and one day we will have a full understanding of how our brains work. Understanding the mechanism won’t suddenly make us not sentient.LLMs are the first technology that can make a case for its own sentience. I think that’s pretty remarkable.

Twiin: The study includes GPT-5. On personal advice queries, GPT-4o and GPT-5 affirmed users' actions at the same rate.

the_af: > I don't quite understand why other people seem to crave thatIt's one thing to say you have found an effective method to counter LLMs' "positivity bias", but do you really not understand human psychology here?People respond positively to other people telling them they are right, or who like them. We've evolved this psychology, it's how the human mind works. You tend like people who like you, it's a self-reinforcing loop. LLMs in a sense exploit this natural bias.> I am constantly amazed at how much they "fall" for the LLM, often believing it's sentient.Why are you surprised? This is the illusion most AI companies are selling. Their chat-like interfaces are designed to fool you into thinking you're talking to a sentient being. And let's not get started with their voice interfaces!

erelong: So, be more skeptical

est: so, always spawn another AI agent to debate!

borski: This is the best I’ve ever heard this put.

seneca: > Lying assumes an intent to deceive.Yeah, fair point. "Misleading" would be a better term, perhaps.