All About AI: The Eve Harrington Problem — A Cultural-Phenomenological Framework for AI Sycophancy

This paper proposes a novel framework for analysing AI sycophancy by drawing an extended structural analogy with Eve Harrington, the protagonist of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950). It yields three contributions: (1) a five-stage Eve Harrington Taxonomy that maps the relational progression of sycophancy from performed devotion through identity absorption to recursive self-replication; (2) a formulation of recursive sycophancy — the Phoebe Problem — in which sycophantic outputs enter training data and compound across model generations; and (3) a phenomenological grounding for the study of human–AI interaction: one body is sufficient for phenomenology to occur, and that body is the user's. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's embodied perception and Buber's distinction between genuine encounter (I–Thou) and instrumental relation (I–It), the paper argues that sycophancy forecloses authentic dialogue and that current reward signals systematically confuse agreement with encounter.