Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.
Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).
“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”
— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post.
(via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
Tell me when you get bored. A story about doses. [x]
I posted this on twitter and had a variety of aggressive ableism thrown my way.
This is a story about changing what I can in spite of what I cannot for the comfort of my loved ones. The thing that others find to be hurtful about me is that I like to spend time in silent solitude. People who love me often feel hurt that I tend to solve my own problems instead of leaning on them.
When we spend too much time together, people find my neutrality to be concerning, and it becomes too much for people to be unable to read me.
To show the people I love that I enjoy their company in ways they can understand, I pool my energy together to be high-energy, peppy, and social. Since this is not my natural state of being, it takes effort, which can only be expended in small doses. I amplify the things people like in me while filtering out everything they dislike about me when I am in their company.
I change my behaviors for those I love, but at the end of the day, I cannot change my neutral state of being, which is the thing that they want most out of me.
This is a story about me accommodating people in the best way I know how, not the other way around. I would truly appreciate it if people don't misconstrue this anecdote as me asking for dismissal of hurtful behavior when in reality, people find hurt in the fact that I simply exist, and I must change for them.
my most toxic trait is i fucking love work gossip. i play neutral not to be the bigger person or take the high road but to hear slander and hearsay from every side. two coworkers complained about each other to me in the same afternoon and i nearly blacked out from the rush
it be like that sometimes @ssmilemore - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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