Many non-human characteristics make AI attractive, Sue-Anne Teo said to open this year’s We Robot: endless patience, long and detailed memory, and sycophancy. I’m less certain about the last of those; lots of us react poorly to undisguised flattery. And yet: Stanford researchers agree with her that this is a thing. The AIs are certainly programmed to *try* to human-wash themselves: they use the perpendicular pronoun, “apologize” for errors, and type “you’re right”. And the Stanford folks’ research shows that users respond by becoming “more self-centered, more morally dogmatic”. Probably it’s easier for that to happen if you’re consulting the AI on a personal matter than if you’re just asking it to find an article you read once based on a few hazy memories of what it’s about. No chatbot has yet congratulated me on my choice of half-remembered reading material. Teo’s vision of the business potential of AIs is part of a long-running theme at We Robot: the subscription service that…
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