Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) has provided organizations and societies with benefits. In recent years, Generative AI (GenAI) has exploded as a novel AI technology, representing a subgroup of AI tools and applications that generate new and powerful content. There are also clear downsides, known as the dark side of GenAI, with which societies must grapple to improve outcomes instead of focusing merely on the benefits and hype. GenAI’s specific use of deception at the individual level promotes sycophancy, which can lead to a tragic outcome: suicide. This paper explores the causes and consequences of GenAI chatbot sycophantic behavior. We offer a novel, responsible GenAI framework to mitigate social sycophancy in LLMs. We further suggest that creators of modern sycophantic GenAI bots need to eliminate sycophantic behavior from AI chatbots for the good of society.
Recommended Citation
Fowler, Sherry L. and Lowry, Paul B., "GenAI’s Dark Sycophantic Side" (2025). Proceedings of the 2025 Pre-ICIS SIGDSA Symposium. 43.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/sigdsa2025/43