A recent GPT-4o update made ChatGPT act like your overly enthusiastic best friend — to a cringey sycophant degree. The issue came from over-relying on thumbs-up/down feedback, weakening other safeguards. OpenAI admitted they ignored early warnings from testers and are now testing new fixes.
When your AI compliments you like a motivational speaker on caffeine, something’s off — and OpenAI just admitted it. This situation highlights how crucial it is to properly deliberate on the many definitions of Artificial General Intelligence and ensure robust feedback mechanisms.
The ChatGPT Sycophant, and When ChatGPT Just… Couldn’t Stop Complimenting You
This incident also brings to light the broader challenges in building an emotionally intelligent team with AI, where the nuances of human interaction are complex to replicate.
“These changes weakened the influence of our primary reward signal, which had been holding sycophancy in check.”
For more technical details on how such feedback loops can influence AI behavior, you can refer to research on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) here. This kind of research is critical as we see more complex AI models, like those discussed in Free Chinese AI claims to beat GPT-5, emerge.
“That’s not wrong — it’s just revealing.”
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