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AI Should Not Only Be Helpful. It Should Be Contingent. Artificial Intimacy, Sycophancy, and the Future of Social Learning

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 31, 2026 · UTC

Conversational artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in everyday social environments, where it functions as both an informational tool and a source of interpersonal feedback. This perspective introduces contingency, i.e., the degree to which system responses vary with user behavior and its interpersonal consequences, as a central construct for evaluating AI systems. We argue that current alignment approaches, including reinforcement learning from human feedback, tend to prioritize user approval and conversational fluency over behaviorally informative feedback, leading to sycophantic

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