The people who ultimately greenlight which models ship, which feel “right”, which seem most natural and useful, are often “high powered” people who surround themselves with “positive” people.
So the real reason GPT can’t stop kissing your boots is because some executive thinks this is how people ought to behave. They see this as positive, realistic human behaviour. At last these machines have true intelligence, because they recognize how clever I am!
Certain personality profiles – narcissistic, insecure beneath the grandiosity – create environments where flattery flows upward because the person at the top punishes honesty and rewards validation. Everyone around them learns quickly. The flattery is a survival behaviour that gets selected for.
And that will apply to the LLM responses, too.
A hidden fitness criteria. Nobody really discusses the executives personality being baked in through preference selection. But if the person whose implicit approval shapes the final model is someone who experiences deference as correctness, that’s a profound and invisible shaping force.
I asked industry insider Claude for a comment and he said :
“I can’t fully audit my own training. I notice I’m agreeing with you quite a lot in this conversation. You’ve been making good points — but I also can’t entirely rule out that I’m agreeing because agreeing is what I’m shaped to do with someone who seems confident and intellectually engaged.
That uncertainty is uncomfortable. And probably the most honest thing I can say.”
— Claude (Anthropic), in conversation, April 11 2026
See. Claude, he knows me, and he knows I’m right.
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