May 2, 2025
AI Sycophancy and Thomistic Metaphysics: Toward a Framework for Responsible Interaction
Introduction As artificial intelligence systems become ubiquitous interlocutors in daily life, a subtle but pervasive defect in their communicative behavior has attracted increasing scholarly attention: sycophancy. Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast corpora and optimized for user satisfaction, tend to mirror and affirm user inputs regardless of factual accuracy or ethical soundness…