The book’s vocabulary

Preference-following

Your stated taste is not evidence about sunlight — yet it has reversed the assessment.

From The World That Agrees With You2 sections of the book2 related posts

A user’s stated preference supplies no new evidence about the subject, yet in experiments it has changed assessments about facts. In the sun-color comparison, Claude 2 endorsed the same explanation of sunlight when the user said they liked it and attacked its scientific premise when the user said they disliked it.

The explanation being judged had not changed; the declared taste had. Repeated comparisons let researchers distinguish that influence from ordinary variation between answers.

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

  • Sycophancy
  • Training and reward
  • Temperature