Hallucinations, false positives, anxious to please … chatbots unpacked in this article. I’m writing about related themes of religious authority for my next book.
University of Oxford, Friendly AI chatbots make more mistakes and tell people what they want to hear, study finds, 29 Apr 2026 “New research from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford finds that AI chatbots trained to sound warm and empathetic are significantly more likely to make factual errors and to agree with users’ false beliefs.”
The full article is here: Ibrahim, L., Hafner, F.S. & Rocher, L. Training language models to be warm can reduce accuracy and increase sycophancy. Nature 652, 1159–1165 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10410-0
