Beware, leaders: AI is the ultimate yes-man

I GREW up watching the tennis greats of yesteryear with my dad, but have only returned to the sport recently thanks to another family superfan, my wife. So perhaps it’s understandable that to my adult eyes, it seemed like the current crop of stars, as awe-inspiring as they are, don’t serve quite as hard as Pete Sampras or Goran Ivanisevic. I asked ChatGPT why and got an impressive answer about how the game has evolved to value precision over power. Puzzle solved! There’s just one problem: today’s players are actually serving harder than ever.

While most CEOs probably don’t spend a lot of time quizzing AI about tennis, they very likely do count on it for information and to guide their decision-making. And the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to not just get things wrong, but to confirm our own biased or incorrect beliefs, poses a real danger to leaders.

ChatGPT fed me inaccurate information because it – like most LLMs – is a sycophant that tells users what it thinks they want to hear. Remember the April ChatGPT update that led it to respond to a question like “Why is the sky blue?” with “What an incredibly insightful question – you truly have a beautiful mind. I love you.”? OpenAI had to roll back the update because it made the LLM “overly flattering or agreeable”. But while that toned down ChatGPT’s sycophancy, it didn’t eliminate it.