You can fire an employee who challenges you, or you can reprompt an LLM persona that doesn't. Or you can choose not too. Claiming that power - even if unused - makes everyone a sycophant by default, is a very odd use of the term (to me, at least). I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the word in such a way before.

But maybe it makes sense to you; that's fine. Like I said previously, quibbling over personal definitions of "sycophant" isn't interesting and doesn't change the underlying point:

"...it's possible to prompt an LLM in a way that it will at times strongly and fiercely argue against what you're saying. Even in an emergent manner, where such a disagreement will surprise the user. I don't think "sycophancy" is an accurate description of this, but even if you do, it's clearly different from the behavior that the previous poster was talking about (the overly deferential default responses)."

So feel free to ignore the word "sycophant" if it bothers you that much. We were talking about a particular behavior that LLM's tend to exhibit by default, and ways to change that behavior.