Ashley Tharpe

Servant leader, Online Educator, Instructional Designer, Public Health Professional, Community Builder | All opinions are my own |

[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.

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

Virginia’s Proposed ‘Assault Weapons Ban’ https://t.co/3zPWVD3oIK via @VAFirearmsLaw

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

Please consider submitting a public comment and ask CEPH to explicitly name CHES® as a credentialed pathway that supports lifelong learning for MPH graduates. reference line 325 (question #6 on the comment form).

https://t.co/jtFtvoVNJG

Sample comment language
Option 1:
“I strongly support CEPH’s emphasis on lifelong learning and continued professional development within MPH accreditation criteria. As a CHES®/MCHES® professional, I encourage CEPH to explicitly recognize the Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES®) credential as a validated pathway for ongoing professional development. Naming CHES® would strengthen alignment between academic preparation and workforce expectations, particularly for graduates pursuing health education and social/behavioral public health roles.”

Option 2:
“As a CHES®/MCHES® professional, I urge CEPH to explicitly recognize CHES® within its lifelong learning criteria to support the health education profession and strengthen workforce readiness and capacity.”

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." —Eric Hoffer

[Rachel Tobac @RachelTobac]

Canvas is hacked and stressing out 230+ Million students, teachers and staff during finals. What does this mean and how do we stay safe? What are the next steps for the 8,800 affected schools during finals. Answered below in my video:

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

At our deepest level, we don’t want to know something;
we want to be known by someone.
We don’t want information; we want intimacy.

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

@shiri_shh What about a tick solution as well.

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

@shiri_shh I'll take two! Give me a link to buy!

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

There are 168 hours in a week; we all have the same amount of time, no more, no less. How are you using your time?

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

"We are not called to wish the world were good, but called to love Goodness itself.

Hence the lives of modern man ought not reflect the times of modernity. He is called to reflect the God, and if one’s life is in harmony with the God, then in totality, all shall be good."

A quote from an email regarding The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway.

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

“A good father is one of the most unsung, unpraised, unnoticed, and yet one of the most valuable assets in our society.”
Billy Graham

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

If the story ended at the cross, it would be another tragedy. There were many crucifixions under Rome. Names we do not remember, rebels and slaves, all killed in the same way.
What makes this story different is the resurrection. The disciples went from hiding in fear to preaching in public. Something happened that transformed them. They did not gain wealth or power from their message. Most were killed for it. They had nothing to gain by inventing it.
It also means that forgiveness is real. The very men who nailed him to the cross were told they could be forgiven. His disciples who abandoned him were restored. Peter, who denied him three times, became a leader. The resurrection was not only about Jesus rising but about broken people being raised with him.

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

The story of the crucifixion and resurrection is the center of the Bible. Everything before points toward it, and everything after flows out of it. Without it, the faith would be nothing more than a collection of laws, songs, and teachings. With it, the entire world is changed.
It is strange that the most important story in history is also one of the simplest. A man is arrested, tried, condemned, executed, buried, and then, raised from the dead. That is the outline. Yet in those events lie the deepest themes of human life: betrayal, fear, injustice, suffering, silence, death, forgiveness, and hope.
The story acts as a mirror. It shows us what power looks like, what weakness looks like, what love looks like, and what the human heart does when it is confronted with both evil and mercy.

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

I saw this and the last one made me laugh. So…what are some hobbies you are doing that make no sense?

[Eric 🇺🇸 @History_Globs]

From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “This man is calling for Elijah.” At once one of them ran and got a sponge, filled it with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink. But the others said, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.”

Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.

Now when the centurion and those with him, who were keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were terrified and said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

Matthew 27: 45-54

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

Big Tech’s AI “boom” might not be what it seems…

💸 Companies are offering ultra-cheap AI tools: sometimes at a loss
📉 This undercuts competition & reshapes the market
🏗️ Massive infrastructure costs (data centers, chips, energy) don’t just disappear
👀 And guess who ultimately pays?
This article compares it to selling $5 steak dinners while losing $15 on every plate, propped up by investors, not true demand.

Are we watching innovation… or a subsidized tech land grab?
🔗 https://t.co/Ns493EEtPT

[Ashley Tharpe @aahudson1]

When you ask AI about forgiveness, relationships, or suffering, you’re not getting a neutral answer. You’re getting a worldview. But whose? Gloo, a faith technology platform, tested 19 AI models to find out. 
The results: every model defaulted to secular, humanistic frameworks when questions touched character, faith, and meaning. Not a single one reached the Gloo “Flourishing AI Christian threshold" across seven dimensions. AI is already a discipleship voice for millions. Gloo is working to align what that voice says with your faith values.