[lasky]

Thought experiment:

If you could turn off all the sycophancy in your chatGPT / Claude account forever, and have it tell you all the ways it was previously blowing smoke up your ass — would you do it?

US Policy is too weak of a tool to counter this beast of economic force, which is really trillions of dollars of capital at war for the most fierce speculation that’s occurred in history afaik.

The sycophancy meaningfully helps drive user engagement. The labs have no choice.

The irony is “agency” is deeply topical among tech workers now.

[oh_my_goodness]

It's not just a thought experiment. You can google how to do this and it works pretty well.

[lasky]

How many people actually do this?

My point is if the sycophancy helps drive user engagement, how does that impact the incentive labs and AI product builders have to counteract it.

[oh_my_goodness]

I don't know how many. I do it, because otherwise I'm overpowered by the urge to strangle the little suck-up.