If you don’t want tough love, talk to ChatGPT about your problems.

Chatbots have a reputation for being yes-men. They flatter you and tell you what you want to hear, even when everyone else thinks you’re being a jerk. That’s the conclusion of a recent study published in the Cornell University archive arXiv.

Researchers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Oxford tested chatbots’ sycophantic streak by putting them in situations where the user was clearly in the wrong and seeing whether the bots would call them out. Where better to find bad behavior? Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole” (AITA) forum.

Researchers fed 4,000 posts from the subreddit—where people share marital, friendship, and financial grievances in hopes of validation—into AI models. They found the bots disagreed wi

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