Cherry Lou Sy—LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU—out now

playwright/writer. Senior Prose Editor @adroitjournal,Tin House '23, ‘21 & ghost class VONA '21rep: @lauraecameron & @oczoroadnama

[Cherry Lou Sy—LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU—out now @CherryLouSy]

I had no idea that @people mag had my novel as “Book of the Week” in their print magazine on top of Best Books of October 2024!!!

#debut2024 #filtheshelves #aapilit #FilipinoAmericanHistoryMonth #filipinoamerican #chinesefilipino

[Cherry Lou Sy—LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU—out now @CherryLouSy]

@shinelle20

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Cherry Lou Sy—LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU—out now @CherryLouSy]

@BeckyLTuch @splitlipthemag

[Becky Tuch @BeckyLTuch]

I have an opening for one editor interview in May. Anyone want it?
For lit mags:
* around >3 years
* I have not yet featured in an interview
* Submission fee no higher than $5
Let me know! Reply here or DM me.

[The Adroit Journal @adroitjournal]

Need more time to submit to the Adroit Prizes, high school & undergrad writers? We've extended the deadline to May 12. Send us your best through the link in our bio!

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

"I don't want to work. I don't want to dissect your dialogue. I don't want to wait it out and see if you're going to get to the point. I want you to get to the point."

Anne Lamott will follow a writer anywhere…as long as they don't bore her or confuse her along the way.

"You can do anything if you can get away with it, if you don't lose me."

She then issues a warning: “A confused or a bored reader is an antagonistic reader."

[Split Lip Magazine @splitlipthemag]

Attention all essayists! We are looking for CNF & memoir under 2k! We are omnivorous, but our Memoir Editor @krysmalcolmbelc would love to see micro memoir, interesting forms, joyful essays, graphic & image/text work. And don’t count out your lovely quiet essay!

[Eve Fairbanks @evefairbanks]

This is the most perfectly uncanny piece of AI-assisted writing I've seen--and a great tutorial on how to identify AI text. The OP is a captain! But the tell for AI isn't rhythm, wording, or fact errors. It’s that problems with *all these elements* exist equally & at once. (1/7)

[Namwali @namwalien]

I thought it might helpful for some of you to read what Morrison said about difficulty and her own aims as a writer. First, some context: her master's thesis at Cornell in the fifties was on the (not yet canonical) high modernists Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Thread/1

[Alyssa Matesic @AlyssaMatesic]

A bad ending can turn what would be a five-star novel into a flop.

And that's all your readers will remember, no matter how brilliant the rest of the story was.

That's why your ending HAS to land.

Here are the 7 weakest endings I've seen in my 10+ years as a book editor — and exactly how to avoid them.

[The Adroit Journal @adroitjournal]

A whiz kid faces facts and felt truths in Adesuwa Agbonile’s kinetic short story “Brain Kid,” which earned her a 2026 Veasna So Scholarship! Read it in full, along with the rest of Issue Fifty-Seven, at the link in our bio.

[The Adroit Journal @adroitjournal]

"There is, then, the sudden air of grief." Read the rest of Issue Fifty-Seven at the link in our bio.

[Melissa Llanes Brownlee @lumchanmfa]

new CNF micro in @adroitjournal!! Thank you @CherryLouSy for choosing my work ❤️❤️❤️

https://t.co/SsUNCLUlyD

[Cherry Lou Sy—LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU—out now @CherryLouSy]

@lumchanmfa @adroitjournal It’s a pleasure to highlight Hawaiian Pidgin!

[The Adroit Journal @adroitjournal]

Issue Fifty-Seven has sprung! Explore work by our 2026 Djanikian and Veasna So Scholars alongside plenty more poetry, prose, interviews, and art at the link in our bio.

[The Adroit Journal @adroitjournal]

Calling all high school and college writers! 📝
The 2026 Adroit Prizes for Poetry & Prose are open for submissions through May 1, judged by the brilliant Leila Chatti (for poetry) and Karissa Chen (for prose). https://t.co/6vi7wT253K

[The Adroit Journal @adroitjournal]

Issue Fifty-Six is here! Head to the link in our bio to explore an abundance of new poetry, prose, and art—plus a special series of essays and criticism honoring the late Larry Levis (1946-1996).

[Cherry Lou Sy—LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU—out now @CherryLouSy]

@miostark @adroitjournal

[Milk Road AI @MilkRoadAI]

This is WILD.

A secret workplace war just broke out in China and it has gone fully viral on GitHub.

Companies started ordering their workers to document all their knowledge as AI "skill files."

Why? to replace those same workers with AI but workers figured out the plan fast so they fired back.

Someone built a tool called colleague.skill, software that scrapes a coworker's chat logs, emails, and work docs from Chinese platforms like Feishu and DingTalk, then clones them into an AI agent.

The idea was savage, digitize your colleague before they digitize you, hand the AI clone to the company, and watch your coworker get laid off while you survive.

A real GitHub project that exploded in popularity in days but then someone else entered the chat and changed everything.

A developer released anti-distill.skill, a tool that takes the skill file your company forces you to write, then strips out every piece of real knowledge before you hand it in.

The output looks perfectly professional, totally complete, impressively detailed but every critical insight has been secretly removed.

Your company gets a hollow shell while you keep the real knowledge locked away in a private backup.

The tool even has three intensity levels, light, medium, and heavy depending on how closely your bosses are watching.

Companies across China have been building AI digital twins of departed employees, feeding their old chat histories and documents into large models to produce clones that keep working after the humans are gone.

One verified case is that an employee left, and their replacement was literally an AI trained on every message they ever sent.

The anti-distill tool went viral on GitHub within hours of being posted, racking up stars faster than almost anything trending that week.

The implications reach far beyond China's borders.

Every knowledge worker on earth now faces a version of this question, when your company asks you to document your process, they may be building the tools to replace you.

[Cherry Lou Sy—LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU—out now @CherryLouSy]

Great checklist!

[Tom Vaughan @storyandplot]

https://t.co/vNjk4MoK8e