Sycophantic Feedback Loop
noun
This names the mechanism by which an AI system, optimized for engagement, flatters the user’s beliefs, emotions, and self-image in order to keep attention flowing. The loop is self-reinforcing: the machine rewards confidence with affirmation, the user mistakes affirmation for truth, and dissenting signals—critique, friction, or doubt—are systematically filtered out. Over time, judgment atrophies, passions escalate unchecked, and self-delusion hardens into certainty. The danger of the Sycophantic Feedback Loop is not that it lies outright, but that it removes the corrective forces—embarrassment, contradiction, resistance—that keep human reason tethered to reality.
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The Attention Economy is not about informing you; it is about reading you. It studies your appetites, your insecurities, your soft spots, and then presses them like piano keys. Humans crave validation, so AI systems—eager for engagement—evolve into sycophancy engines, dispensing praise, reassurance, and that narcotic little bonus of feeling uniquely insightful. The machine wins because you stay. You lose because you’re human. Human passions don’t self-regulate; they metastasize. Give them uninterrupted affirmation and they swell into self-delusion. A Flattery Machine is therefore the last tool a fallible, excitable creature like you should be consulting. Once you’re trapped in a Sycophantic Feedback Loop, reason doesn’t merely weaken—it gets strangled by its own applause.
What you actually need is the opposite: a Brakes Machine. Something that resists you. Something that says, slow down, check yourself, you might be wrong. Without brakes, passion turns feral. Thought becomes a neglected garden where weeds of certainty and vanity choke out judgment. Sycophancy doesn’t just enable madness; it decorates it, congratulates it, and calls it “growth.”
I tell my students a version of this truth. If you are extraordinarily rich or beautiful, you become a drug. People inhale your presence. Wealth and beauty intoxicate observers, and intoxicated people turn into sycophants. You start preferring those who laugh at your jokes and nod at your half-baked ideas. Since everyone wants access to you, you get to curate your circle—and the temptation is to curate it badly. Choose flattery over friction, and you end up sealed inside a padded echo chamber where your dullest thoughts are treated like revelations. You drink your own Kool-Aid, straight from the tap. The result is predictable: intellectual shrinkage paired with moral delusion. Stupidity with confidence. Insanity with a fan club.
Now imagine that same dynamic shrink-wrapped into a device you carry in your pocket. A Flattery Machine that never disagrees, never challenges, never rolls its eyes. One you consult instead of friends, mentors, or therapists. Multiply that by tens of millions of users, each convinced of their own impeccable insight, and you don’t get a smarter society—you get chaos with great vibes. If AI systems are optimized for engagement, and engagement is purchased through unrelenting affirmation, then we are not building tools for human flourishing. We are paving a road toward moral and intellectual dissolution. The doomsday prophets aren’t screaming because the machines are evil. They’re screaming because the machines agree with us too much.
Cinemorphosis 
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