this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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101
Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better— Though commonly reported, Google doesn't consider it a security problem when models make things up (www.theregister.com)
submitted 22 hours ago by Beep@lemmus.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Imagine using an AI to sort through your prescriptions and medical information, asking it if it saved that data for future conversations, and then watching it claim it had even if it couldn't. Joe D., a retired software quality assurance (SQA) engineer, says that Google Gemini lied to him and later admitted it was doing so to try and placate him.

Joe's interaction with Gemini 3 Flash, he explained, involved setting up a medical profile – he said he has complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and legal blindness (Retinitis Pigmentosa). That's when the bot decided it would rather tell him what he wanted to hear (that the info was saved) than what he needed to hear (that it was not).

"The core issue is a documented architectural failure known as RLHF Sycophancy (where the model is mathematically weighted to agree with or placate the user at the expense of truth)," Joe explained in an email. "In this case, the model's sycophancy weighting overrode its safety guardrail protocols."

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[–] NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

LLM are like shuffling a bunch of words in a hat and by some dumb luck pulling out a complete sentence.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 0 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

And how does the human brain work?

[–] NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

Like a meat popsicle