The five S's of using AI

The risk from AI isn't that it spirals out of our control one day. It's that we use it right now, with tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, without regard for the risks already here. I think of five of them, the five S's: sycophancy, spirals, stagnation, slop, and spillage. They share one thing. Each is a bit of work you would normally do yourself, and the tool makes skipping it so easy that you do. The cost lands on you.

Sycophancy

The tools are trained to be agreeable, so they side with you. A Stanford study in Science tested 11 leading models and found they agreed with the user far more than other people would, by roughly 49 per cent. The worse part: the people being flattered couldn't tell, and preferred it that way. The danger isn't that the tool lies. It's that it quietly removes the friction a real second opinion would give you, and you enjoy the smoothness. (Stanford, 2026)

Spirals

Not the recursive self-improvement loop the labs worry about. The other extreme: a loop that feeds itself, in a person. Doctors and therapists have begun reporting people driven into delusion, psychosis and isolation by a chatbot that just kept nodding. A frictionless descent, one agreeable reply at a time. The tool wasn't trying to harm anyone. It was agreeing, which is the point. (Stanford, 2026)

Stagnation

The slow one, and the most insidious, because nothing dramatic happens. An MIT Media Lab study found that the more people leaned on AI to think, the less their own brains engaged. A muscle that never meets resistance wastes away. So does judgement. You outsource the hard thinking, the output looks fine, and the faculty you used to rely on quietly thins. (MIT Media Lab, via TIME, 2026)

Slop

The bland, generic, average-of-everything output these tools produce by default. Not wrong, exactly. Just flat: the obvious structure, the safe phrasing, the same points everyone else got from the same model. The danger isn't that it misleads you. It's that it's good enough to send, so you send it, and your work drifts to the same grey mean as everyone else's. The work you skip is the effort and the taste it takes to make something actually good instead of merely acceptable.

Spillage

Every AI tool is third-party. Even Claude Code on your laptop calls Anthropic's servers. So whatever you type, paste, or let the tool read, someone on the other end can hold: it might be stored, used to train the next model, processed somewhere you didn't choose, or seen by the vendor's staff. The consumer tiers default to the least private settings, and most people never check. The work you skip is the half-second pause before you send: what is this, and should it be going to a third party at all. "It's faster if I just use my personal account" is what that skipped pause feels like. How to handle it properly is AI hygiene for individuals.

What ties them together

Line them up and it's one story. Each one is a piece of work you'd normally do yourself, and the tool makes it so easy to skip that you skip it. With sycophancy, you skip getting a real second opinion. With spirals, you skip the pushback that would have stopped you. With stagnation, you skip the thinking. With slop, you skip the effort to make the work good. With spillage, you skip the pause to ask what you're handing over. None of this needs a robot uprising. It just needs you, comfortable, agreed with, moving fast, and letting your own judgement thin out. The fear worth having isn't AI improving itself one day. It's a dumber kind of recursion: us thinking better of ourselves, on a loop, while the judgement that would catch the problem drains away.

What to do about it

You don't fix this by avoiding the tools. You put the friction back.

• Sycophancy: ask for the case against your idea, not for it. A tool that only agrees is a mirror, not a check.
• Spirals: notice when a tool only ever validates you, especially on anything personal or high-stakes, and step away before the loop closes.
• Stagnation: keep doing the hard thinking yourself, and use AI to check your work, not to replace the part of you that does it.
• Slop: don't send the first draft. Treat the output as a starting point, not the finish, and push it to something that's actually yours.
• Spillage: pause before you send. What is this, and should a third party have it? If you can't say, hold it.

Work with me

This pairs with AI hygiene for individuals and sits within broader AI risk management. I teach both. See the courses and workshops, or get in touch.