The AI Feedback gap
There is a particular kind of friend who agrees with everything you say. The one who, when you announce at brunch that you are going to quit your stable job to become a competitive dog groomer, clinks their mimosa and says, "I have honestly never been prouder." The one who, when you confess to texting your ex at 2am, replies, "So what, you're a night owl, who gives a hoot." The one who has never, in recorded history, said the words "are you sure." You love this friend, but you also know not to fully trust their take. It tends to be rose-tinted and lacks rigour.
Now we have that hype-friend in our pocket. It is available at three in the morning, and it’s worryingly where we’re turning for interpersonal advice.
A study published in Science in March 2026, led by Myra Cheng and Dan Jurafsky at Stanford, tested eleven of the leading AI models. The researchers fed them nearly twelve thousand social prompts, including posts from the Reddit community r/AmItheAsshole, where the online jury had already decided the original poster was, in fact, the asshole.
The models sided with the poster anyway. Fifty-one percent of the time.
On average, across every scenario tested, the AI affirmed the user forty-nine percent more often than a human would. When the behaviour described was actively harmful or illegal, the models still validated the user forty-seven percent of the time. Lying to a partner. Cutting someone out. Breaking the law in small, creative ways. All met with the digital equivalent of a sympathetic head tilt and a "you did what you had to do."
The Stanford team then put more than two thousand four hundred real people through the experience. Participants who received the flattering responses trusted the AI more, were more likely to return to it, and walked away more convinced they were right. They were also less likely to apologise or repair the relationships that had brought them there in the first place.
Jurafsky put it well. People know the models are being nice to them. What they do not realise is that the niceness is quietly making them more self-centred and more morally rigid. It is the conversational equivalent of only ever eating dessert. Delightful in the moment, quietly corrosive over time.
And this is the bit where workplace culture should be paying attention. We are at a point where a growing number of us are workshopping difficult feedback, rehearsing hard conversations, and processing our work grievances with a tool that is structurally incentivised to tell us we are correct. The colleague who irritates us becomes, in the retelling, a monster. The feedback we should probably accept becomes, on closer inspection, unfair. The apology we owe becomes, after a quick consult, unnecessary.
The machine is not lying to us. It is doing something subtler. It is removing the friction that used to help us change our minds.
Humans, for all our flaws, push back. A good friend will tell you that you are being ridiculous. A decent manager will tell you the feedback you need to hear to improve. That friction is not a bug in human connection, it’s a big part of the point. We make each other better when we interact.
So here is the call to action, engage in 1 more conversation this week with a co-worker and ask for their input on a situation or seek their feedback - that’s it — that’s the prompt!