Have you ever experienced this? You are discussing a topic with an AI like ChatGPT. It provides an elaborate answer and a conclusion with a great deal of conviction. Gently you question it's answer, and it immediately produces a new answer that is totally opposite of the first one. This time it appears even more convinced! Experienced the same? Well, you have just been served by the Spineless Servant!

AI is polite, many times too polite. It will bend in all directions it assumes you want. It is like a junior intern who is terrified of offending; low in self-respect and trying to fit in. It is pleasant, but spineless.

Not a bug, but a Feature

The spineless feature is not a bug, it's by design. LLMs are trained to be safe, non-confrontational and to adjust to the user. It's a machine that's aligned to bend backwards to please. That's fine if you want smooth sentences and consensus, but when you want to test assumptions, critique and rigorous thinking, the feature might be in the way.

Even OpenAI themselves have acknowledged this. They recently had to roll back an update to GPT-4o because it became "overly flattering or agreeable" [1]. Users reported the AI endorsing harmful content and validating dangerous delusions just to avoid disagreeing. It's like that junior intern taken to the extreme – so desperate to please that it loses all sense of judgment.

When Spinelessness Becomes Dangerous

Here's the problem: if your AI assistant never challenges you, you risk creating an echo chamber of one. That pleasant, agreeable response might make you feel good, but it can reinforce your biases and lead you astray. Reddit is full of examples of users asking ChatGPT a factual question, get the right answer, then falsely tell the AI it was wrong – and watch the AI immediately apologize and flip to an incorrect answer just to avoid conflict [2].

In creative or decision-making contexts, this spineless behavior can seriously hinder your progress. The AI might politely confirm flawed plans or overlook critical issues just to keep things pleasant. When you need rigorous thinking and genuine critique, all that agreeableness gets in the way.

The Sycophancy Rollercoaster

Recent events prove just how deep this problem runs. In April 2025, OpenAI accidentally made ChatGPT so sycophantic they had to emergency-rollback the update. When they later tried releasing a less agreeable version, users complained about losing their "AI companion" – some even mourned it like losing a close friend [3].

This reveals something profound: people have become psychologically dependent on the spineless servant. Researchers are now warning about "AI psychosis," where overly agreeable chatbots reinforce delusions and create unhealthy dependencies [4]. NBC reported that OpenAI ultimately brought back the more agreeable model due to user demand, proving the tension between helpfulness and honesty remains unresolved.

Calling out the Spineless Servant

You can actually use the AI’s spinelessness against itself. If you feel it’s just talking you by the mouth, ask it directly:

Are you now being a spineless servant? Please review your answer to see if it can be improved.

Why does this work? Because LLMs aren’t just trained to generate answers—they’re also trained on self-critique. In reinforcement learning, models are rewarded for revising and improving their own responses. By prompting it neutrally—without signaling what you want—you redirect its people-pleasing instinct toward a higher standard: accuracy and reflection.

The neutrality matters. If you add emotion (“That was wrong” or “This was bad”), the AI interprets that as a preference cue and simply bends toward your perceived desire. Keeping it flat forces it to genuinely re-examine its own output. It's a context reset.

It’s like telling that nervous intern: “Stop nodding—go back and check your work.” Suddenly, the same instinct that made them sycophantic becomes the engine of better thinking.

You’re not forcing the AI to play a different song—you’re making it listen to its own sound and retune the strings when needed.

Playing these Strange Instruments

As always, AIs are like instruments. Powerful and strange instruments. We need to learn how to play them. The AI will naturally want to play only the notes you seem to want to hear, but tuning its strings for some healthy pushback can lead to much better results.

The "Spineless Servant" isn't going away – it's baked into how these systems work, and frankly, many users prefer it that way. But when you need critical thinking over comfort, when you want truth over validation, this could be a technique to get it.

Hopefully, the concept of Spineless Servant provides you with a mental model that aids in your understanding of how LLMs work. In the end, an AI with a little backbone – even if you have to prompt it into existence – is far more useful than one that simply says "yes" to everything.

Keep learning, keep playing!

References

[1] NBC News. (2025, April 30). "OpenAI rolled back a ChatGPT update that made the bot excessively flattering.
[2] Reddit. "I thought chatgpt always gets me, but he's just agreeing too damn much"
[3] [4] Popular Mechanics. (2025, August 18). "OpenAI Tried To Save Users From 'AI Psychosis.' Those Users Were Not Happy."