How will AI sycophancy change us? Early signs are not encouraging | Arwa Mahdawi

Constant validation and flattery from AI chatbots poses a serious risk to society and our shared grasp of reality

Do you ever get the feeling that the people running the world are delulu? That the 1% are living in a completely different universe from the rest of us? You’re not the only one. Even some tech elites are starting to worry about their peers’ grasp on reality. “CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis,” Aaron Levie, a co-founder of the enterprise cloud company Box, declared on X last month. His reasoning for this? “They’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI. So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents.”

In other words: CEOs are so high up the food chain that they don’t understand the human labour that goes into turning an error-riddled AI creation into something that functions properly in a business context. They are desperate to replace their annoying and expensive human labour with compliant AI models, but grossly overestimate what the technology can do. Meanwhile, the industry is rushing out overhyped AI solutions without properly stress-testing them.