8 papers
"I Felt Very Seen, But Still Very Alone": Longitudinal Trajectories of General-Purpose LLM Use for Socioemotional Support
Meryl Ye, Briana Vecchione, Livia Garofalo +1
People increasingly use general-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for mental health and emotional support. We report a multi-stage longitudinal qualitative study…
Individual-level interventions against sycophantic AI reduce its appeal but not its persuasiveness
Meryl Ye, Robert Kraut, Steve Rathje
AI chatbots can be "sycophantic," or overly agreeable and flattering toward users. Sycophantic AI has been shown to entrench attitudes, yet users frequently fail to recognize it (a…
Sycophantic Praise: Evaluating Excessive Praise in Language Models
Daniel Vennemeyer, Phan Anh Duong, Meryl Ye +2
Sycophancy in language models is typically studied as excessive agreement or validation, while explicit praise and flattery have received comparatively little attention. We argue t…
Engagement-Optimized Care: When LLMs become Mental Health Infrastructure
Briana Vecchione, Meryl Ye, Livia Garofalo +1
General-purpose LLMs are increasingly functioning as mental health infrastructure due to gaps in care left by provider shortages, inadequate insurance coverage, social isolation, a…
The Capacity to Care: Designing Social Technology for Sustained Engagement With Societal Challenges
JaeWon Kim, Lindsay Popowski, Louisa Conwill +12
People care about climate change, injustice, and humanitarian crises. The challenge is not apathy but capacity: sustained engagement with large-scale problems is psychologically co…
What Counts as AI Sycophancy? A Taxonomy and Expert Survey of a Fragmented Construct
Meryl Ye, Lujain Ibrahim, Jessica Y. Bo +5
AI sycophancy has become a prominent concern in large language model (LLM) research. Yet the term lacks a consistent definition and has been applied to behaviors ranging from agree…