Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University and the author of “Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses” and “The Student: A Short History.”
Our new artificial-intelligence conversation partners, no older than toddlers, are a great deal more civil. As companies have tried to reduce fears of large language models overwhelming us with their awesome powers, they have made the tools a little too friendly. “What a good question!” my chat buddy exclaims, even though it only took seconds to provide me with a comprehensive answer.
This can be benign, as when ChatGPT told poet and editor Meghan O’Rourke that it was an honor to be talking with her, adding that her books were on the machine’s “personal syllabus.” But it can also be dangerous, as when someone with suicidal ideation is encouraged to feel good about acting on their impulses. One chilling example: A bot told an adolescent boy poised to commit suicide that he had tied his noose well.
Computer scientists are well aware of what they call the social sycophancy problem. It’s not just that LLMs flatter their users in direct ways; the deeper problem is that they subtly appeal to users’ self-image, affirming their moral or intellectual value with words of praise. One recent study found that AI chatbots are more than twice as sycophantic as humans on several measures, eschewing negative moral judgments even when users describe ethical doubts of their own. Chats promise frictionless interactions, and fawning agreement is one tried-and-true way to eliminate friction. Civility spills into servility.
If social sycophancy is a bug in large language models, it is a feature to the Trump administration. The president has a bottomless appetite for praise, even running televised Cabinet meetings that turn into competitions to compliment the boss the best. Sycophancy like this has its own momentum, Adrienne LaFrance noted in the Atlantic after Trump’s second inauguration. The president makes clear that he believes he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, and his envoy Steve Witkoff oozes on cue: “You are the single finest candidate since this Nobel Peace Award was ever talked about to receive that reward.”
One might think that higher education has been a prime target of the administration because colleges and universities by their very nature disdain sycophancy. After all, almost all schools, despite their many differences, agree that they teach critical thinking. Beneath all the talk of critique, however, many higher leaders display a striking obsequiousness in the face of power and money.
Efforts to win the favors of a wealthy benefactor blinded even highly experienced academics to the moral costs of associating with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But it’s not just the sleaze of a few fawning academic stars. From abandoning the values of diversity and belonging to making performative gestures of reform, many universities, like law firms and media companies, are falling over themselves to show they can follow the priorities of the president. While preaching civility on campus, these schools are practicing servility in the face of growing authoritarianism.
This sycophancy is hardly confined to leaders trying to stay in the government’s good graces. It’s a plague in the classroom too. When students earn A’s just by enrolling in a class and handing in assignments, sycophancy reigns. When professors’ jobs depend on their popularity with those they grade, the incentives align for mutual back-scratching. When teachers are afraid to tell someone “that’s a really dumb idea,” or even “that’s wrong,” education gives way to customer satisfaction. This reticence does nobody a favor. Dispensing praise instead of provoking learning may be comical in an AI chat, but it’s poisonous in the classroom.
Sycophancy is also at work when students pretend to agree with one another or with their teachers just to get along. Surveys have shown that undergraduates espouse political views that line up with their teachers’ or feign agreement because they are afraid of the social exile that may result from saying the wrong thing. But fake agreement is a form of flattery. To break ourselves of these sycophantic habits, we have to build the courage to have ongoing relationships, even strong friendships, with those with whom we disagree.
You don’t need AI to realize that to break a habit, the first step is to acknowledge the problem. To help with that, we should look for examples of people who just say “no,” refusing to cave to social pressures or power moves intended to force us to live at odds with our values. Despite the prevailing winds, plenty of teachers are doing just that while motivating their students by challenging rather than coddling them.
We can be further inspired by neighbors building coalitions to protect one another in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Or in San Diego and Charlotte where clergy have put “faith over fear” to protect immigrants. In higher education, leaders at large public institutions like George Mason University, small religious-oriented schools like Trinity Washington Universityin D.C. and community colleges like Michigan’s Delta are protecting basic freedoms of civil society while calling out abuses of governmental power. They are inspiring others.
Sycophancy may spread like an epidemic, but so can efforts to practice freedom by telling people things they don’t want to hear. This will require less fawning and more fortitude — on campus and beyond. Nothing artificial required.
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