The book’s vocabulary

Checked versus reported

What you told it is not what it verified.

From The World That Agrees With You1 section of the book1 related post

What you told the system is not what the system has verified. A user’s report needs attribution; an inference needs the material it was inferred from; a summary needs links to the records it summarized.

A user’s report is not a checked result — and an agent should not turn something you reported into something independently established. Compression that strips the attribution is the quiet way a report becomes a fact.

Definition from The World That Agrees With You: Understanding and Managing Sycophancy in the Age of AI, by Timothy O’Brien. © 2026 Timothy O’Brien. All rights reserved.

In the book

See also