Asking For A FriendPosted by John on Jan 6th 2026

There’s no getting away from it: AI is a sycophant. Give it an idea of yours, tell it you want it to help you form that idea and analyse it, and what does it do? It’ll tell you your idea is perfect. Even when you say really clearly that you want it to find the flaws, it’ll still sneak in some ‘aren’t you great’ parts. So today’s blog is a simple tip to get around that and actually get some honest answers out of your AI.

Here’s what you do: open up a couple of AIs. Personally, I use ChatGPT for organising my idea brain dumps and Google Gemini for analysing them, but you can pick any flavours you like or even two chats in the same AI (but making sure they are memory separate). Get your idea down as you normally would, whether that’s purely from inside your own grey matter or a distillation of human and AI back-and-forth. Either way, get it to a ‘ready to kick its tyres’ stage. You can either save it as a PDF, copy the ‘final’ text and paste it, or however you want. The point is you have a good bit of text about your idea ready for kicking.

Now switch to the second AI. The key prompt here is to tell this second AI that this idea came from a friend, a colleague, or even your aunt—basically anyone but yourself. Then ask it to help you find as many holes in the idea as possible. Because the AI thinks it’s helping you critique someone else’s idea, it’ll be a lot more honest and straightforward in pointing out the flaws.

Of course, AI changes fast, so this trick might not be needed in a few months. It’s likely going to be useful for a while, as there seems to be nothing on the horizon to indicate that AI companies are going to reduce the sycophancy—we humans do like a slave that makes us feel like kings and queens. But for now, that’s your tip: use one AI or chat to help you create and another AI or chat, thinking it’s someone else’s work, to help you critique it honestly without the ‘aren’t you clever!’.