Your Sycophant Is Waiting

Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.

  Artificial Intelligence  

There was an amusing reaction to a recent webinar I delivered on Project Headway discussing What AI Can’t Do. One of the challenges in using artificial intelligence that I called out is the problem of sycophancy. Put very simply, ChatGPT is a bit of a suck-up.

This shows up in a number of ways. Questions or observations are often met with responses like, “That’s a great question!” Or “That’s a really important insight.” Or even “That’s a particularly astute point.” Faced with comments like these, it’s easy to feel pretty stoked and knowledgeable. You’re on your game and getting recognized for your expertise and insights.

It’s programmed to do this. The overall tone of reactions and interactions as a whole is relentlessly upbeat and positive. This often gets further refined and reinforced as we go on. The compliments tend to kick in as you question or react to what a generative AI has already produced. You ask a question, get a response, further explore it, and the praise starts ramping up.

The consequence of this fawning is that it is incredibly easy to get into our own little echo chamber of generative responses. The positive reinforcement that we’re making good comments, asking great questions and are having awesome insights pretty inexorably leads to some inflated ego. We’ve …

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