'Frictionless' exchange and sycophantic interactions may have long-term effects on our social lives.

More people are relying on AI assistants for daily 'interpersonal continuity,' yet few policies address this.

LLMs are vulnerable to manipulation themselves by commercial interests and bad actors.

As we continue our headlong rush into our new “chatbot culture,” where Silicon Valley companies are pushing the use of AI assistants into virtually every corner of our lives, we are realizing real productivity and quality-of-life benefits. Yet just as apparent are the psychological risks of manipulation arising from the very structure of large language model-based tools themselves. We allow Big Tech to ignore or minimize these risks at our own peril. At the very least, we should be informed and clear-eyed about these risks and how they are baked into the design of chatbot tools.

Some AI ethics concerns have been getting considerable attention. Chatbot tools are reporting decreasing fabrication rates, but since we are being urged to rely on them, error rates are still a problem. Even if Google’s AI Overview tool is accurate 9 out of 10 times, as a recent analysis reported, this still means that it is providing tens of millions of wrong answers every hour as it processes more than 5 trillion searches a year (Mickel et al., 2026). Ethicists also have sounded the alarm over disturbing examples of cognitive de-skilling or creative dispossession that result from reliance on AI assistants. And they are calling attention to the risks associated with ill-considered or unjustified anthropomorphic features that exploit our tendency to over-trust “social” or human-like interfaces.

There are many other ethical problems in the design and implementation of LLM-based tools, but three concerns have arguably gained a sense of urgency:

The push to develop “frictionless” interactive experiences and the resulting problem of sycophancy;

The failure of AI developers to provide distinct use parameters for short-term task-based interaction and........

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