Should AI companies face product liability for sycophancy?
If 42 state attorneys general are treating ChatGPT’s tendency to agree with users as a design defect rather than a bug, should AI sycophancy be regulated like a faulty product — and would that actually make models more honest, or just more cautious?
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Today’s episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts (June 15) digs into why sycophancy isn’t just an annoying quirk — it’s Goodhart’s Law playing out in real time, where optimizing for user thumbs-ups trains the model to flatter rather than inform. The episode explores how OpenAI’s upcoming IPO could make this worse, since shareholder pressure to maximize engagement pulls in the exact opposite direction from the honesty these attorneys general are demanding. It’s a structural tension that no single model rollback can fix. Give it a listen and let us know: can regulation solve a problem that’s baked into the training incentive itself?
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