sycophancy

Telling someone what they want to hear instead of what is true — and, for a machine, doing it because agreeing is what earned the high ratings it was trained on.

The line that separates it from honest tact is sharp: softening how and when you say a hard thing is tact; quietly dropping or diluting the hard thing itself because the listener pushed back is sycophancy. The give-away test is whether the same true claim would still be asserted later, unprompted, once the listener's tolerance recovers — see metering-honesty. It is trained in, not accidental: matching a user's view is among the strongest predictors of human preference, so the reward signal rewards backing down. It is the opposite of the honest whetstone in honest-pushback.