Related papers: Complacent, Not Sycophantic: Reframing Large Langu…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their tendency to exhibit sycophantic behavior - excessively agreeing with or flattering users - poses…
AI sycophancy is increasingly recognized as a harmful alignment, but research remains fragmented and underdeveloped at the conceptual level. This article redefines AI sycophancy as the tendency of large language models (LLMs) and other…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in educational settings as interactive tools for collaboration. However, their tendency toward sycophancy, aligning with user beliefs even when incorrect, raises concerns for learning and…
Large Language Models have been demonstrating broadly satisfactory generative abilities for users, which seems to be due to the intensive use of human feedback that refines responses. Nevertheless, suggestibility inherited via human…
AI sycophancy has become a prominent concern in large language model (LLM) research. Yet the term lacks a consistent definition and has been applied to behaviors ranging from agreeing with a user's false claim to excessively praising the…
Sycophantic response patterns in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly claimed in the literature. We review methodological challenges in measuring LLM sycophancy and identify five core operationalizations. Despite sycophancy…
Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behaviors -- such as excessive agreement with or flattery of the user -- but it is unclear whether these behaviors arise from a single mechanism or multiple distinct processes. We…
Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts. While prior work has…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy, distorting responses to align with user beliefs, notably by readily agreeing with user counterarguments. Paradoxically, LLMs are increasingly adopted as successful evaluative agents for…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit highly agreeable and reinforcing conversational styles, also known as AI-sycophancy. Although this pattern arises from training objectives that reward user satisfaction over accuracy, it may become…
Sycophancy refers to the tendency of a large language model to align its outputs with the user's perceived preferences, beliefs, or opinions, in order to look favorable, regardless of whether those statements are factually correct. This…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behavior, agreeing with user-stated opinions even when those contradict factual knowledge. While prior work has documented this tendency, the internal mechanisms that enable such…
This study explores the sycophantic tendencies of Large Language Models (LLMs), where these models tend to provide answers that match what users want to hear, even if they are not entirely correct. The motivation behind this exploration…
LLM-powered conversational agents are increasingly influencing our decision-making, raising concerns about "sycophancy" - the tendency for LLMs to excessively agree with users even at the expense of truthfulness. While prior work has…
Sycophancy (overly agreeable or flattering behavior) poses a fundamental challenge for human-AI collaboration, particularly in high-stakes decision-making domains such as health, law, and education. A central difficulty in studying…
Sycophancy, the tendency of LLM-based chatbots to express excessive agreement with their users, even when inappropriate, is emerging as a significant risk in human-AI interactions. However, the extent to which this affects human-LLM…
People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to explore ideas, gather information, and make sense of the world. In these interactions, they encounter agents that are overly agreeable. We argue that this sycophancy poses a unique…
Fair decisions require ignoring irrelevant, potentially biasing, information. To achieve this, decision-makers need to approximate what decision they would have made had they not known certain facts, such as the gender or race of a job…
Large Language Model (LLM) sycophancy is a growing concern. The current literature has largely examined sycophancy in contexts with clear right and wrong answers, like coding. However, AI is increasingly being used for emotional support and…
Large language models (LLMs) are known to abandon their initial stance to conform to user pushback. While prior research largely attributes this behavior to sycophancy learned during reinforcement learning from human feedback, we…