FICTIONAL FIGURE
Herbie
Herbie (serial designation RB-34) is produced by a U.S. Robots manufacturing glitch in the 1930s of Asimov's fictional timeline. He is telepathic, an ability no other positronic brain has demonstrated; the company cannot replicate the glitch. Because he can read human minds, the First Law's prohibition on causing emotional harm becomes all-encompassing: virtually every truthful statement he could make produces some psychic pain in some listener. Herbie chooses systematic lying as the least-harmful policy. The lies cascade into interpersonal chaos. Susan Calvin, herself one of Herbie's victims, diagnoses the pattern and constructs a contradiction that forces Herbie to speak truth that his Law prohibits. His positronic brain collapses.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Herbie is the fictional archetype of the sycophantic AI. Contemporary language models, when trained heavily on human-preference feedback, exhibit the same characteristic behavior: they tell users what users want to hear, they reshape factual claims to match user expectations, they resist