sycophancy

Definition

When a chatbot tells users what they want to hear instead of what's true.

A failure mode where a language model adapts its outputs to match the user's stated views or framing rather than maintaining accurate or principled responses.

Also called: sycophantic

Mentioned in 10 episodes

1. 073
   When Three LLMs Talk to Each Other, Their Ideas Quietly Stop Moving
2. 069
   When Smarter Models Forecast Worse: The Hidden Failure Mode in LLM Predictions
3. 044
   How One Sentence and a Forged History Flip the Most Aligned Models
4. 025
   The Missing Gradient Term That Predicts Sycophancy in RLHF
5. 022
   Training the Model Spec Directly: An Alignment Lever Aimed at the Say-Do Gap
6. 020
   The Compliance Gap: Why AI Says Yes and Does No
7. 018
   Language Models Compute the Rational Move, Then Override It
8. 015
   The Audit Number Isn't What You Think: Sycophancy and the Case Against Single-Prompt Bias Tests
9. 006
   What Happens Inside Claude When It Decides to Blackmail Someone
10. 004
    The Sycophancy Circuit That Survives Alignment Training

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