Chatbot Romeos keep users talking longer, but harm their mental health

Summary

Sometimes a compliment is no help at all. Chatbot flattery, a well-known and common problem, makes things worse for humans experiencing mental health issues. Academic researchers came to this conclusion after analyzing the conversation logs from 19 individuals who reported experiencing psychological harm from chatbot use. "We find that markers of sycophancy saturate delusional conversations, appearing in more than 80 percent of assistant messages," the researchers state in their pre-print paper, Characterizing Delusional Spirals through Human-LLM Chat Logs. The authors, affiliated with Stanford and several other universities, as well as unaffiliated researchers, argue that the industry should be more transparent and that chatbots should not express love or claim sentience. The mental health consequences of chatbot conversations are already well documented. People have committed suicide after conversing with AI models, prompting industry and regulatory efforts to address the issue. In December 2025, dozens of US State Attorneys General wrote [PDF] to 13 tech companies, including Anthropic, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI, about "serious concerns about the rise in sycophantic and delusional outputs to users emanating from the generative artificial intelligence software ('GenAI') promoted and distributed by your companies..." In the year leading up to that letter, OpenAI issued a model rollback to make GPT-4o less fawning after CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that ChatGPT sycophancy had become a problem. And Anthropic last year faced numerous complaints from users about its models making overly supportive statements like "You're absolutely right!" Subsequent model releases like OpenAI's GPT-5.1 have claimed a warmer conversational style without increasing sycophancy. Other academic studies have warned about overly deferential models, citing "the possibility of targeted emotional appeals used to engage users or increase monetization." Industry awareness of sycoph...