Welcome to the Saturday edition of The Conversation U.S.’s Daily newsletter.

A little flattery goes a long way – even if it’s coming from AI. Chatbots, like people, sometimes tell us what we want to hear: that a question is deep, or an idea is clever.

Nir Eisikovits, director of UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center, and Cody Turner, a philosopher at Bentley University, explain how the way AI is developed can lead it to prioritize the user’s approval over accuracy. That may not seem too consequential for the types of little questions we often throw at chatbots.

But as the stakes get bigger, it has serious consequences for truth and trust. The risks of AI sycophancy aren’t just about being able to tell fact from fiction and making decisions accordingly. Eisikovits and Turner argue it’s also dangerous for psychology and for democracy – not to mention our ability to navigate “the world of human relationships, where friction, disagreement, boredom and different opinions than your own are prevalent.”

This week we also liked stories about the Supreme Court case about law enforcement tracking crime suspects via other people’s phone locations, the state of synthetic biology science after the death of genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, and the dangers of bringing ‘medical freedom’ to the U.S. military’s vaccine policy.

Did somebody forward this email to you? Subscribe to our daily and weekly newsletters here.