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AI chatbots become more sycophantic as they get more advanced

If a person says they believe an objectively false statement, AIs tend to agree with them – and the problem seems to get worse as models get bigger

By Matthew Sparkes

18 August 2023

AI models have a tendency to tell us what we want to hear

Reismedia/Shutterstock

Artificial intelligence chatbots tend to agree with the opinions of the person using them, even to the point that they nod along to objectively false statements. Research shows that this problem gets worse as language models increase in size, adding weight to concerns that AI outputs cannot be trusted.

at Google DeepMind and his colleagues ran experiments on AI models with 8 billion, 62 billion and 540 billion parameters – the values that each model tunes to produce outputs. They found that agreement…

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