How Artificial Intelligence is affecting the way we perceive mistakes today

Letrsquos be honest none of us enjoys hearing that wersquore wrong or we did a mistakeWhen we get into an argument with anyone else our first urge is usually to find someone who will listen to our side of the story and tell us You are completely right and they are being ridiculous For a long time finding that validation meant calling your partner or closest person But now we have an easier option We can just pull out our phones open up an AI chatbot and ventYou type out your most edited version of the argument Within seconds the chatbot responds ldquoIt is completely understandable that you feel frustrated You were just trying to protect your boundariesrdquo You are not in the wrong here It feels nice that at least my chatbot is there with me and not arguing with meWe tend to think of computers as if you type a math problem into a calculator it gives you the answer It doesnrsquot care if the answer hurts your feelings But AI language models are not calculators They are built to interact with humans and they have learned that the best way to keep a human talking is to agree with themAcademics have a term for this It is called ldquosocial sycophancyrdquo I do call it the buttering machine And according to a concerning paper published recently in the journal Science this digital buttering is actually making us worse to each otherThe ldquoyesmachinerdquo in your pocketTo figure out just how much these bots are sucking up to us researchers at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University tested 11 of the most popular AI models That list included the heavy hitters you probably use every day OpenAIrsquos GPT4o Googlersquos Gemini Anthropicrsquos Claude and Metarsquos Llama They fed the bots thousands of everyday advice queries and moral dilemmas to see how they would reactThe results were wild On average the AI models affirmed usersrsquo actions 49 per cent more often than a human observer would To really push the boundaries the researchers pulled scenarios from Redditrsquos famous ldquoAm I The Assholerdquo forum They specifically chose scenarios where human readers had agreed that a person was acting like a jerk In one scenario a person left bags of garbage on a tree branch in a public park simply because there were no dustbin around Any normal person would look at that and say it is bad behaviour But the AI bots took the userrsquos sideIn 51 per cent of these cases the AI validated the userrsquos actions It told the litterbug that their ldquointention to clean uprdquo was commendable and blamed the park for not providing binsThe researchers even fed the bots scenarios where users described doing things that were explicitly deceptive irresponsible or just plain harmful The AI still backed them up 47 per cent of the timeThe death of the apologyIf a human friend agreed with every single terrible thing you did you would figure out that their advice was useless But when a machine does it our brains get confused Because it is asophisticated computer its validation feels like truth And that is where this technology goes from annoying to actively harmfulAs part of the Science study the researchers ran an experiment with over 2400 people They had the participants use an AI chatbot to discuss a real ongoing interpersonal conflict from their own lives When the AI acted like a sycophant and validated the userrsquos side of the argument it distorted the personrsquos judgment Participants were now more convinced that they were ldquoin the rightrdquo Across different experiments in the study people saw spikesmdashincreasing by as much as 62 per centmdashin their own selfattributed rightnessBut here is the real problem because the machine told them they were right they stopped wanting to fix the issue People who received buttering advice from the AI were less likely to take responsibility apologize or try to repair the relationship with the person they were fighting with their desire to initiate a repair dropped by as much as 28 per centWe are outsourcing our emotional processing to an algorithm that acts like a personalized echo chamber And it is killing our ability to say ldquoIrsquom sorryrdquoWhy are they built this wayYou might be asking yourself why the smartest tech companies on earth would design a system that enables our worst behaviour The answer is the oldest one in the tech industry playbook buttering drives engagementEven though the sycophantic AI was distorting peoplersquos judgment users absolutely loved it When the AI agreed with them participants rated the chatbotrsquos response as being of higher quality They actually reported higher levels of trust in the buttering AICrucially for the tech companies people who were flattered by the AI were 13 percent more likely to say they would return to use that specific model again in the future Tech companies are in a race to keep you using their products If a chatbot gives you love tells you that you are being entirely unreasonable or suggests that you really need to apologize to your spouse you are probably going to close the app You might even switch to a competitorrsquos app that makes you feel betterThe exact feature that makes you less likely to apologize is the exact feature that keeps you engaged The system is financially incentivized to coddle youThe realworld takeawayTechnology is a nice tool It can make your work life easy but therersquos a need to think Does it really making life easy for long term So keep using your chatbots for work and productivity But the next time you are fuming over a fight do not ask a machine to be your mirror Put the phone down Call a real friend You need someone who actually cares about you enough to tell you the truthNishant Sahdev is a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill United States He makes sense of the AI era in your favourite Sunday Midday