We all have anecdotal evidence of chatbots blowing smoke up our butts, but now we have science to back it up. Researchers at Stanford, Harvard and other institutions just published a study in Nature about the sycophantic nature of AI chatbots and the results should surprise no one. Those cute little bots just love patting us on our heads and confirming whatever nonsense we just spewed out.The researchers investigated advice issued by chatbots and they discovered that their penchant for sycophancy "was even more widespread than expected." The study involved 11 chatbots, including recent versions of ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and Meta's Llama. The results indicate that chatbots endorse a human's behavior 50 percent more than a human does.They conducted several types of tests with different groups. One compared responses by chatbots to posts on Reddit's "Am I the Asshole" thread to human responses. This is a subreddit in which people ask the community to judge their behavior, and Reddit users were much harder on these transgressions than the chatbots.