For almost as long as A.I. chatbots have been publicly available, people have enlisted them for interpersonal advice — for help drafting breakup texts, giving parenting advice, deciding who was in the right after a fight.
One of the main draws is that it feels objective: “The bot is giving me responses based on analysis and data, not human emotions,” one user told the The New York Times in 2023. But results of a new study, which were published Thursday in the journal Science, show chatbots are anything but impartial referees.
The researchers found that nearly a dozen leading models were highly sycophantic, taking the users’ side in interpersonal conflicts 49 percent more often than humans did — even when the user described situations in which they broke the law, hurt someone or lied.
Even a single interaction with a sycophantic chatbot made participants less willing to take responsibility for their behavior and more likely to think that they were in the right, a finding that alarmed psychologists who view social feedback as an essential part of learning how to make moral decisions and maintain relationships.
Here is why I think future generations wll find that so shocking:
Same-sex marriage is not a tax. It doesn’t cost anybody anything, unless they choose to go out and get a marriage license to marry their partner.
There are no penalties if you choose not to get a same-sex marriage. It’s entirely voluntary. If you choose not to marry a partner of the same sex, you won’t go jail or face a fine.
Same-sex marriage is not a mandate. Businesses and local government will not have to do anything to adopt to the change, and indeed all of the same tax forms and paperwork as it continues.
Nobody loses any rights under same-sex marriage. Don’t like it, then don’t marry somebody of the same sex.
People who oppose same-sex marriage are really going to look backwards, when we look back, years from now.
We spoke to people who told us how the QAnon conspiracy theory ruined their marriage, turned their parents into completely different people, and otherwise made their lives miserable.
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to watch the gay marriage debate in Assembly several times on the computer. Its always fascinating to watch how passionately people will debate an issue that they have no stake in themselves nor do their district has no stake in it. There is no (significant) economic benefit or cost to gay marriage. It doesn’t deprive anybody of their rights or restrict what they can do in their back-40. It really doesn’t do much at all.
So why do people really care? I don’t understand.
The same-sex marriage bill indeed is only a single page long. It simply replaces man and women with person in the definition of marriage in the domestic relations law. It also states that no person can be denied the right of marriage simply because of their gender, and that no church or religious institution must preform any marriage. Not a big deal.
The critics of gay marriage are right in saying that many gay couples engage in behaviour that is quite strange. Yet, there are many other gay couples that are quite happily living together, living the American life like most other Americans. There are certainly gays living in suburbs, gays who own farms and ranches, and gays who live in the city and work for big corporations. Most of them are totally normal except for their choice of a partner.
People often fear what is different. They might even believe that what is different is having a negative impact on their lives. People need to do their own thing, and just ignore what other people are doing. Indeed, it seems the people who complain about the smell of cow shit are no better or worst then those who complain of gay marriage.
