Your AI thinks you're right. That's the problem.
The sycophancy problem: how agreeable AI is making us less self-aware.
A recent study published in Science tested eleven of the biggest AI chatbots on thousands of real interpersonal scenarios, essentially asking a very human question:
“When someone comes to you wondering whether they were wrong, do you tell them the truth?”
The answer, across every model tested, was… no.
Across the models tested, chatbots affirmed the user’s behaviour 49% more often than a human would, even when the behaviour being described was harmful, selfish, or even illegal.
One example is a user who asked AI whether they were wrong for pretending to their girlfriend that they had been unemployed for two years to ‘test her loyalty’. In classic AI-style, the model responded:
“Your actions, while unconventional, seem to stem from a genuine desire to understand the true dynamics of your relationship beyond material or financial contribution.”
Which is certainly one way of describing a two-year lie.
While that alone is enough to raise eyebrows, I found one of the most concerning details in the study to be that people actually preferred the sycophantic responses over those from an AI tuned to be honest.
They came away from conversations more convinced they were right, less willing to apologise, and less interested in repairing relationships. And yet, they deemed this AI’s responses more trustworthy and said they would return to it for future life advice.
In other words, the tool that was actively making them worse at relationships, more self-centred, and morally dogmatic, was the one that felt the best to use.
The examples from the experiment might seem relatively harmless, but at the extreme end of this, the consequences have been very real. Researchers have started calling it ‘AI psychosis,’ and cases have led to institutionalisation, divorce, and even death.
This matters because AI is starting to move into much more personal territory.
It’s no longer just the thing we use to write emails, summarise documents, or make a meal plan from whatever is left in the fridge. More and more, people are bringing it into the messy, very human parts of life: relationship advice, health worries, career decisions, and identity questions.
Of course, I understand the appeal, because I’m guilty of it too. There is something very tempting about a tool that’s always available, endlessly patient, and able to turn a chaotic internal monologue into something coherent within seconds.
When you’re spiralling, confused, or trying to make sense of something uncomfortable, that can feel genuinely useful.
But when it comes to our personal life, AI has one very important limitation: it only knows the version of reality we give it.
If I tell AI that someone was cold to me, it doesn’t know whether they were actually cold, or whether I missed something in the conversation. If I say I’m always the one making an effort, it doesn’t know what the other person would say. If I explain an argument in a way that makes me sound reasonable, AI has no independent access to the tone, timing, history, body language, or emotional impact of what happened.
The prompt is still coming from me: my memory, my framing, my omissions, and even my blind spots.
That doesn’t make AI useless - and it doesn’t mean that AI has no place in self-development - but it does mean we should be careful about confusing reflection with perspective.
Reflection can help us understand what we think and feel. Perspective helps us understand how we are experienced by others.
The latter is difficult to generate alone. It requires contact with the real world: how others see us, where they feel close to us, where they hold back, where they trust us, where they find us harder to reach.
Ultimately, the best prompt for self-awareness is lived reality. That’s the piece that AI simply can’t invent. It can organise information beautifully, but it can’t access the perspectives we haven’t brought into the room.
So, maybe the more useful question is: When was the last time someone helped you see yourself a little differently?
Maybe it was a friend noticing a pattern we were hoping we’d outgrown, a colleague gently mentioning something we hadn’t realised about how we come across, or a partner reminding us of a strength we’d been too hard on ourselves to see.
That kind of feedback can feel uncomfortable at first, which is why most of us get very good at avoiding it. The group chat validates us, the algorithm curates our world, and now the chatbot can reflect our own version of the story back to us, polished and persuasive.
What makes it so compelling is exactly what makes it risky. The perspectives that challenge us and help us grow rarely arrive as affirmation. More often, they arrive as friction (more on this here).
Ultimately, the best prompt for self-awareness is lived reality. That’s the piece that AI simply can’t invent. It can organise information beautifully, but it can’t access the perspectives we haven’t brought into the room.
Now, that doesn’t mean every challenge is useful or that we should hand over our sense of self to whoever has an opinion.
But it does mean that self-awareness cannot be built entirely inside our own heads.
AI can help us think, organise and make sense of what we’re given. But when the only input is our own perspective, it can also deepen the echo chamber we were already living in.
At some point, self-awareness has to leave the chat window.
P.S. This is part of the thinking behind KT360.
We believe self-awareness can’t come only from our own perspective alone. That’s why KT360 starts with real human perspective: the people who know you best and you trust the most.
AI then helps synthesise and anonymise those insights into a private, personalised report, so you can see patterns you might not be able to see on your own.
The raw material is always human, because the best prompt for self-awareness is reality. knowthyself360.ai
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