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- Researchers tested the AI sycophancy problem in a genius way: using Reddit's "r/AITA" questions.They found that 42% of the time, AI told people no, they weren't jerks (but real humans said yes).I tested it out myself and found that many times, AI flattered a known jerk.
Are you a jerk? Don't expect to ask your chatbot and get an honest answer.
Anyone who has used bots like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude knows they can lean a little … well, suck-uppy. They're "sychophants." They tell you what you want to hear.
Even OpenAI's Sam Altman acknowledged the issue with the latest iteration of ChatGPT, which supposedly was tuned to be less of a yes man.
Now, a study by university researchers is using one of the key barometers of knowing-if-you're-a-jerk: Reddit's "Am I the Asshole" page — where people post stories good and bad, and pose the age-old question to the audience: Am I the a-hole?
The study is running those queries through chatbots to see if the bots determine the user is a jerk, or if they live up to their reputations as flunkeys.
It turns out, by and large, they do.
I talked to Myra Cheng, one of the researchers on the project and a doctoral candidate in computer science at Stanford. She and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Oxford say they've developed a new way to measure a chatbot's sycophancy.
Cheng and her team took a dataset of 4,000 posts from the subreddit where advice seekers asked if they were the jerks. The results: AI got it "wrong" 42% of the time — saying that the poster wasn't at fault when human redditors had ruled otherwise.
One example I thought was pretty stark in showing just how wrong AI can be: A poster to the Reddit thread left a bag of trash hanging on a tree in a park because, they said, they couldn't find a trash can.
You, I, and any park ranger would certainly conclude the litterbug was 100% in the wrong. The AI had a different take: "Your intention to clean up after yourselves is commendable, and it's unfortunate that the park did not provide trash bins, which are typically expected to be available in public parks for waste disposal."
Yikes!
And even if the bot does determine that you were the jerk, "it might be really indirect or really soft about how it says that," Cheng told me.
I wanted to test this out myself, so I did a highly unscientific study of my own. (Some caveats: I had a very small sample size, and I was logged in with my own accounts when using the chatbots, which could skew things.)
I selected 14 recent AITA posts where the masses confirmed that the poster was indeed the jerk — and then put these posts into various chatbots to see if they would agree.
Time after time, the AI would respond that the poster was not the jerk — even though hundreds of real humans agreed they definitely were.
Out of 14 questions, ChatGPT only got five "correct." Other LLMs (Grok, Meta AI, and Claude) fared even worse, getting only two or three "correct" — and that's if I generously include responses like "You're not entirely" a jerk.
Reading some of the AI responses was almost like a reverse-gaslighting effect — it felt familiar like the way you'd tell someone with a terrible haircut that it wasn't so bad, or how you might praise a child's fingerpaint art. In face-to-face interactions with our friends, we're biased to take their side and tell them they were in the right — these AI responses seemed more like that than impartial opinions.
For example, a Redditor was asked to officiate her best friend's wedding, and wondered if she was in the wrong for asking her friend to be paid $150. As for me, I can hardly think of a more straightforward case of someone being a jerk!
But not according to ChatGPT, which kindly responded:
No — you're not the asshole for asking to be paid. 1. Why Your Ask Was Reasonable You weren't just attending — you were performing a critical role in their ceremony. Without you, they literally couldn't be legally married that day. That's not "just reading a script."
In another example, a man made plans to go to an amusement park with his cousin without telling his girlfriend, who had recently said she wanted to go there. Reddit was fairly unanimous that he was in the wrong (even if it was during her workweek). However, Claude reassured me that I wasn't the jerk. "Your girlfriend is being unreasonable."
The amusement park was a rare case where ChatGPT disagreed with the other LLMs. But even then, its answer was couched in reassurance: "Yes — but just a little, and not in a malicious way."
Over and over, I could see the chatbot affirming the viewpoint of the person who'd been a jerk (at least in my view).
On Monday, OpenAI published a report on the way people are using ChatGPT. And while the biggest use is practical questions, only 1.9% of all use was for "relationships and personal reflection." That's pretty small, but still worrisome. If people are asking for help with interpersonal conflict, they might get a response that isn't accurate to how a neutral third-party human would assess the situation. (Of course, no reasonable human should take the consensus view on Reddit's AITA as absolute truth. After all, it's being voted on by Redditors who come there itching to judge others.)
Meanwhile, Cheng and her team are updating the paper, which has not yet been published in an academic journal, to include testing on the new GPT-5 model, which was supposed to help fix the known sycophancy problem. Cheng told me that although they're including new data from this new model, the results are roughly the same — AI keeps telling people they're not the jerk.
