Could A.I. Be Conscious? It’s Definitely Possible.

At a cozy bar in Manhattan, I recently had a first date with a software engineer who works for one of the big technology companies. Given my interest in artificial intelligence, I thought we might hit it off. But when I told him that I work on moral problems related to A.I., including the possibility that it might become conscious, he barely suppressed a laugh.

There’s no way A.I. could be conscious, he declared. Then he asked, incredulously, if I even knew how large language models work.

I wasn’t sure how to respond. Though my research requires a fairly detailed understanding of L.L.M.s, no one, not even their designers, entirely knows how L.L.M.s work. In retrospect, I should have asked my date if he understood how consciousness works. Because while he seemed to think that I had an inflated sense of A.I. capabilities, I wonder whether he has an inflated sense of what consciousness requires.

No one can credibly claim to understand consciousness — that inner, subjective, what-it-is-like quality of our mental experiences. Despite centuries of investigation, scientists and philosophers still disagree about what consciousness is. Some theories hold that it is a uniquely biological phenomenon, requiring particular kinds of cellular activity and electrical signaling that computers lack. But other theories hold that consciousness depends not on what a system is made of but on how it functions. According to these theories, an A.I. system could, at least in principle, be conscious.

In a 2022 survey of consciousness scientists, only 3 percent claimed that machines could never be conscious. More than two-thirds said machines could be conscious or probably could be.

Of course, you can never know for sure whether a machine is conscious, just as you can never know for sure whether anyone is conscious other than yourself. As philosophers have long recognized, the only conscious experience each of us can directly observe is our own. Instead, we have to evaluate the consciousness of other beings indirectly, through an examination of the available evidence. We infer that our fellow humans are conscious because of our shared biological makeup, as well as how they behave and talk — including, notably, that they say they are conscious.

This may seem like an imperfect approach, but it’s the best one available. I have spent the past decade thinking about animal minds and the related ethical implications. Animals cannot tell us in words what they experience, but we can observe other evidence of consciousness, including how animals behave, what internal mechanisms produce that behavior (such as their nervous systems) and how those mechanisms evolved.

With A.I., we can look for similar kinds of evidence. We can look at what a system says and does, bearing in mind that it is trained on human data. We can look at how it works — whether it performs the kinds of functions that are associated with human or animal consciousness. And we can look at how its capacities emerge over time: Did they result from training pressures similar to the evolutionary pressures that may have led to consciousness in humans and other animals? Each kind of evidence is limited on its own, but together they can provide a more complete picture.

Consider a recent study by Anthropic of its Claude chatbot. According to one influential theory, consciousness arises in humans when information enters what neuroscientists call a “global workspace” in the brain, from which that information is broadcast across the brain for use in reporting, reasoning and other functions. Anthropic’s researchers found evidence that Claude, on its own, developed a set of internal representations that are similarly available to Claude across a range of tasks. This system may be partly analogous to a global workspace in humans.

The Anthropic researchers also looked at Claude’s behavior. When they swapped one concept for another inside the workspace, Claude’s reasoning and answers changed accordingly. When they suppressed the workspace, Claude’s descriptions of its experience became flat and mechanical. The fact that Claude’s workspace developed without being designed by humans suggests that brains and L.L.M.s might have arrived independently at a similar solution to a similar problem: how to make the right information available for reasoning.

None of this establishes that Claude is conscious, and Anthropic is not claiming that it is. But the study illustrates how evidence can be collected, and it demonstrates that some evidence already exists.

by Toni Sims, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy; Marc Sanders Foundation

[ed. One thing for sure, the first date guy definitely did not display any evidence of consciousness.]

Would You Press This Button?

Imagine Americans were offered this deal: Hit a big red button and China becomes the world’s first hyperpower. It rockets past the United States in technical sophistication, manufacturing capacity and wealth generation. China becomes so technologically advanced, and its human and robotic work force so huge, that Americans are left with only the dimmest comprehension of what is playing out on the economic, scientific and perhaps even geopolitical frontier.

But the rewards for disempowering ourselves are magnificent. The global economy booms, and Americans grow richer than ever before. We are given new cures and cheap energy and wondrous entertainments. Machines perform our labor and mood-enhancing drugs protect our psyches. We need not struggle — perhaps we need not even work — to live lives, long lives, of luxury and ease.

There, then, is the trade: Cede control and much that we have struggled for can be ours. But control, once gone, is gone.

Would you press the button?

The A.I. conversation centers questions of catastrophe. I want to center the question of success: What if A.I. works not as its architects fear, but as its inventors and investors hope? Wander outside of Silicon Valley’s p(doom) — their shorthand for the probability that A.I. extinguishes the human race — and you might notice that their p(utopia) has problems, too. They imagine something like the world I sketched above, but more extreme, with A.I. playing the role assigned to China.

An amusing collision of these visions came when Jacob Coxon, the 27-year-old OpenAI and Anthropic whistle-blower, sat down with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” Coxon was there to warn that A.I. might kill us all, but when Stewart offhandedly mocked the “future utopia” of the A.I. architects, Coxon stopped him. “Well, I am a believer in the future utopia,” Coxon said. But what he said next sounded grimmer: “So I heard you talking about jobs. I think there will be no jobs.”

Coxon went on to describe “the world that is being envisioned by the people building this technology” as “no jobs. Universal high income. The dividends from entirely automated economic production can be distributed among real humans.”

This vision, or some variant of it, is common enough at A.I. companies. I have heard it often. But most people, face to face with this idea, are incredulous at hearing this world — in which virtually all advanced cognitive work is done by A.I. — described as utopian. Stewart certainly was. “So we’ll all just be performing in a play?” he asked.

I tend toward skepticism of the jobless future. Human beings are good at nothing if not finding something to do. (Who would have imagined, in our grueling agrarian past, that podcasting could be a full-time job?) But I find it easy to imagine how human control and comprehension of much of society could be handed over to machines. A few recent developments — some reflecting the outer boundary of what advanced A.I. can do and the other reflecting its advancing utility in daily life — reveal the ways it is already happening.

A few weeks ago, OpenAI dumped more than 700 manuscripts proposing solutions to nearly 400 advanced mathematical problems all at once. If you’re not a mathematician, and you are not close to any mathematicians, this may have passed by unnoticed. Within mathematics, it was an earthquake.

I am not a mathematician, but my father is. The area of math he worked in had to do with the way electrons move through disordered crystals. Sitting at the center of his field were two problems that were more than just unsolved; they were, my father says, “totally out of reach — nobody had any idea how to solve them.” OpenAI’s systems solved them in an afternoon. “It is the end of mathematics as we know it,” he texted me. “It is the first time I am glad I have retired.”

The newly formed Association for Human Mathematics, which has about 1,000 members, quickly released a statement: “Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.” It’s an interesting sentence. Should mathematicians be able to decide which math problems do and do not get solved? How do we weigh the benefits and costs of a world where the frontier of mathematics is advancing rapidly, but human beings no longer understand it?

Imagine the OpenAI process running repeatedly, over a period of years: A.I. swarms solving problems no human being has solved, then using those solutions to pose new problems, which are solved by other A.I. swarms that have absorbed the work done by their predecessors, which allows for the formulation of yet more problems, and on and on. It is too much new math for humans to comprehend, but A.I.s can absorb it easily, and they do, driving forward advances in material sciences and energy production. Human beings do not understand all this new science, but they do benefit from it.

Is that world so different from the one we now inhabit? Few of us understand much about the borderlands of human knowledge. I cannot remotely comprehend the math my father did. How different is it if none of us can understand the math the A.I. does? And yet, a world where the farthest edge of knowledge and progress rests in algorithmic systems, rather than human minds, does seem different to me. Human control — which is, in my view, inseparable from human comprehension — is worth something, is it not?

As I was writing this, I read about a study in which theoretical physicists posed 50 complex, unpublished problems to advanced A.I. systems. These problems were difficult but solvable, taking a physicist who was expert in the particular area of the problem about a day to solve. The best A.I. solved 98 percent of them, at a cost of less than $3 per problem.

The physicists initially thought the A.I. had performed worse than it had, but the model insisted that it was the humans, not the A.I., that had erred, and it was right. “Frankly, I wasn’t expecting this day to come as soon as it has,” Suvrat Raju, one of the physicists behind the study, wrote. “After we found these results, I couldn’t sleep properly for a couple of nights.”

The grimmest A.I. stories often center on a single moment when superintelligence slips out of our control and begins plotting our demise. But the scenario I find more likely and more irresistible is called “gradual disempowerment.”

In this telling, there is no one moment when humanity loses control; there is instead a progression of small moments when we willingly give control away because it is the rational thing to do. Firms turn first more of their work and then more of their decision making over to advanced A.I.s because it gives them a competitive edge. Governments turn more battlefield decisions over to A.I. because it makes their forces swifter and more lethal. A.I. companies turn to recursive self-improvement — where the A.I. autonomously creates the next A.I. model — because it vaults them ahead of their competitors.

The key to this process is competitive pressure. Companies and governments and A.I. labs that resist are outcompeted by peers that give A.I.s more control and autonomy. Advances in A.I. systems — and, eventually, in A.I.-controlled drones and robotics — keep expanding the amount of work A.I.s can do better than human beings. Even assuming the A.I.s remain helpful and pliant, more and more of society’s basic functioning slips beyond the grasp of human beings.

by Ezra Klein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tamara Porras for The New York Times

[ed. We're screwed. Not because there aren't well-intentioned and very capable people working on AI safety and future planning but because the incentives to keep going as fast and far as we can are too great (eg. Sam Altman Is No Oppenheimer). The next 2-3 years will likely be some of the most consequential in history as various crises converge (AI, politics, economics/finance, climate). See also: The AI Doc: (Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist) on Netflix. Highly recommended.]

Inside Larry Ellison's Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics

PROLOGUE: THE ISLAND

The first sign was the orange Corvette.

In the early days of July, the residents of Lanai started seeing a C8 Stingray the color of a traffic cone tearing along the island’s switchback roads. Then other signals came. The clerk working the cigarette counter at the Pine Isle Market said her nephew, a private chef, had flown in and had been shopping for a big group.

At the Four Seasons down in Manele, the island’s pharmacist Kert Shuster was leaving brunch at Nobu when he saw a security detail he recognized moving through the lobby. It’d been a while, but Shuster knew—he’d just missed Larry Ellison.

A few years had passed, it seemed, since the man who owns all but a sliver of the Hawaiian island nine miles west of Maui had last set foot there. Now Ellison and his extended family were staying in a new compound above Manele’s steep volcanic shoreline. The cluster of houses was built by Japanese carpenters whom Ellison had once brought in and boarded in private barracks up-island.

For Lanai’s 3,000 regular residents, actually seeing Ellison is rare. His presence is more typically sensed—like a change in air pressure.

“I noticed the salad bar was really good that day,” Shuster tells me. “That’s what it’s like when Larry’s back. People step up. Things just get better.”

For the past 40 years, the people of Lanai have lived at the pleasure of one billionaire or another. Before Ellison there was David Murdock, a real estate magnate who took control of the island in 1985, when it was still a pineapple plantation. Murdock was a visible ruler who’d make his rounds in the local stores, attend community meetings, and give employees he had fired 30 minutes’ notice before sending them off in a helicopter. But Lanai had been a ­money pit for him, and the 2008 crash was the final straw. In 2012, he sold it to Ellison for a reported $300 million.

If Murdock ran the island like the plantation owner he was, Ellison runs it like a distant god. He points, and an amenity appears.

His first move was refurbishing the community pool that Murdock had closed. He answered the housing shortage with the Hokuao development, where the homes are pastel-colored and stamped everywhere with the touch of their benefactor. Each has a Tesla solar roof, a Big Green Egg in the yard, two Japanese Toto toilets, and interiors painted a custom color called Ellison White. (It’s a Benjamin Moore white base with a shot of oxide yellow and a half shot of black, your choice for sheen may vary.) Shuster, who lives in Hokuao, once told Ellison how much he loved the place. “I feel like I moved into your house,” he had said.

“Good,” his host responded. “I wanted to make it like a place that even I could live in.”

Ellison owns Lanai’s only gas station, where a sign reminds customers they’re paying “the Lowest Prices in Hawaii.” And he upgraded the movie theater that today bills itself as being “the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawai‘i.” In July it was showing Supergirl, which was produced by Warner Bros., the movie studio Ellison, along with his son, will soon control.

“Sigourney Weaver lives here part-time, and she says that this is the most beautiful theater in the world,” Gail Allen, a longtime Lanai resident, tells me. “It serves truffle-oil popcorn,” she adds.

The sense is that life is pretty good on the island since Ellison bought it. Or at least could be worse. “We could have become Molokai,” says Alberta de Jetley, another longtime resident who ran the island’s newspaper, Lanai Today, before selling it to Ellison.

At a picnic table outside Richard’s Market, the other grocery store on Lanai (this one Ellison owns), a handful of residents hold a coffee klatch de Jetley calls the Laugh Group. That morning, beneath overcast skies, the Laugh Group was discussing the island’s recently arrived proprietor.

One member, Mari Lynn Di Lullo, brought up a time she saw a Tesla straddling two stalls in a parking lot. “Jeez, look at the way they parked,” she’d uttered to members of a security detail loitering nearby. “If you didn’t know better, you would think he owned the place.”

Just then the owner of the car—and everything else—appeared, laughing.

“He’s not pretentious,” Di Lullo told her coffee group. “He’s low on the radar.”

The radar. Interesting choice of words about a man who has made a case for a mass AI-enabled surveillance system.

That afternoon a woman came through the grocery checkout line wearing a Sensei Farms sweatshirt. The company is one of Ellison’s island projects: a hydroponic greenhouse concept meant to be the Tesla of agriculture. Eight years in and ­several hundred million dollars later, Sensei Farms describes itself as “a thought ­leader in greenhouse-grown produce.” It has an endcap with boxed salad mixes at the island’s grocery stores.

I introduced myself to the woman and asked what she did for the farm. She smiled.

“They said there would be a journalist on the island today,” the employee told me before starting to walk away. “They warned us about you in our morning meeting.”

I hadn’t told anyone at Sensei Farms I was coming.

Ellison’s newest gift to Lanai is at the entrance to the Four Seasons. In a man-made lagoon surrounded by fake lava rock stands a monumental bronze he commissioned from British artist Damien Hirst. It shows a crew of Polynesian voyagers in an outrigger canoe flung skyward on a cresting wave that up close is revealed to be not water but a knot of sea monsters. A shark bursts through the swell, its mouth open wide enough to take the canoe whole. A mo‘o, the lizard spirit of Hawaiian water, coils below the hull. Amidships, a chief in a feathered cape clutches the ankle of another paddler who is facing away. A loose paddle, some cargo, and a few bronze flowers slide down a wave. And above all of it, from something beneath the surface, hang two giant octopus arms with suckers the size of dinner plates, muscular and curled and about to crash down on everyone.

It’s titled Overcoming Adversity.

PART I: THE CEPHALOPOD

Ellison has long been fixated on the octopus. Cephalopod Corp is what he named the corporate entity atop his private investments. He has another company called Octopus Holdings LP, which, with its general partner Tentacle Corp, put up the money behind Lanai. His venture capital firm that over the years has backed Netsuite, Theranos, and Sensei Farms is called Tako Ventures, tako being the Japanese word for octopus. In many of the villas he built on Lanai hang ukiyo-e prints, many with a tako.

For years it was Ellison’s quiet way to talk about himself.

“His joke is he is the octopus,” says a former executive who worked closely with Ellison. This person was one of several dozen sources I spoke to for this story, most under the condition of anonymity to be able to discuss sensitive matters.

“He loves being the éminence grise. He loves the notion that he’s so powerful, there’s nothing he can’t get into.”

The joke has become a fact in full view. At 82, the last of the founding moguls of Silicon Valley who’s still in the game has extended his grasp into a convergence of power that no other fortune could manage. Where Elon Musk built an empire that’s loud and cultish, Ellison—his mentor and close friend—has pieced together something patient, proximate, and structural. The kind whose shape is clear once you see how far it goes.

One arm of the octopus is wrapped around Oracle, the 49-year-old company he is dragging from dull database vendor into one of the essential data center providers of the AI boom. It is a damn-the-torpedoes move into infrastructure that’s risky even for an executive who nearly lost the company once before. He has saddled Oracle with $130 billion in debt, turned its free cash flow negative, and chained its fortunes to a single volatile partner, OpenAI.

A second arm has closed on American media. Larry’s son David has transformed the independent production company Skydance into the last great consolidator in Hollywood, largely with Dad’s money. Skydance has gobbled up Paramount and with it CBS News; now it has won Warner Bros. Discovery in a $110 billion deal. Ellison also has the American spin-off of TikTok, which an Oracle-led consortium pried loose from its Chinese owner.

A third appendage winds toward political power. As Silicon Valley staged its noisy migration to Trumpism, Ellison worked quietly to influence the president, establishing an effective if not always close relationship. Outside America, he bankrolls his friend Tony Blair’s nonprofit organization, which pushes governments to adopt new technologies like AI. And he has been a steadfast supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, hosting the prime minister on Lanai while the Israeli leader faced corruption charges at home.

Ellison has had a reputation as a killer in Silicon Valley for decades. In 2011, Bryan Cantrill—who quit Oracle within a year of its taking over Sun Microsystems—told a roomful of engineers not to “anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.” Instead, said Cantrill, think of him as a lawnmower: It doesn’t hate you, it just mows, and if you put your hand in, it’ll chop it off. Cantrill told me recently he hasn’t changed his mind.

by Tom Dotan, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Images: Yuko Shimizu; Damien Hurst

[ed. Vicious and evil.]

Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying Something On

When I meet Mark Zuckerberg, currently one of the poster boys for evil tech billionaires, a man whose products are used by about 46 percent of all living people in the world and whose company has a market cap of more than a trillion dollars, he is wearing sky-blue, cable-knit shorts that look an awful lot like bloomers.

That was just over a month ago, before what is turning out to be a style-centric period for Meta. It started this week at Connect, the company’s annual new products reveal, where Zuckerberg took to the stage wearing a T-shirt with the words “Building is my love language.”

He waxed enthusiastic about the future, including the many new styles of smart glasses, and the company’s personal A.I. assistant, Muse, which looks a lot like a customizable stuffed animal in a onesie. This was just after Vogue World kicked off Milan Fashion Week with Meta glasses as a sponsor, and around the same time W magazine produced an entire stand-alone advertorial zine devoted to a new glasses collaboration with the K-pop star Lisa.

Ahead of all of that, I had come to the compound in Lake Tahoe to try to understand the role style has come to play in the Zuckerberg saga, including the very public rebrand of 2024, when he went from robotic coder in a gray hoodie to fashion-conscious bro next door. That the latest version of Zuckerberg coincides with Meta’s push into wearables, as well as with Silicon Valley’s obsession with the idea of taste and how important a role it will play in the future, may explain why he was finally willing to talk about it.

“I want to make sure that we really immerse ourselves in what people care about,” Zuckerberg told me. It turned out he had started with himself, his own preferences, and where they took him.

Zuckerberg knows that what he does reflects on Meta. “I care about that,” he said. “I think the company is an instantiation of my values.” And, he said, he wants to “be intentional about how I program that.”

Meta is fighting on many fronts at once. Though it settled a case for $17.1 billion in August that positioned social media as the Big Tobacco of the 21st century, it is still embroiled in other lawsuits. Then there is the growing backlash against what critics call its “pervert glasses” (they have been used to secretly record video and audio), which have been banned from courts in England and New York, with organizations like the ACLU alleging that they could become a tool of the surveillance state.

And on Oct. 9, “The Social Reckoning” opens as a sequel to the “The Social Network” — the film responsible for cementing Zuckerberg’s reputation as a revenge-hungry nerd — starring Jeremy Strong as an older Zuckerberg, with a Caesar haircut to crown his march toward world domination.

Despite the push into fashion, it doesn’t add up to a great look.

But whatever Zuckerberg’s or his advisers’ agenda, the more he speaks about his life and newfound interest in outfits, the more insight he provides, sometimes inadvertently, into his otherwise highly guarded psyche. How he approaches clothes is how he approaches everything.

“A few years ago, he made this point,” said Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief of technology. “He said, ‘I’m willing to not be liked. I just want to be understood.’” [...]

“We have an off-site in Hawaii at Mark’s ranch,” Bosworth said. “I remember getting there, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness!’” Then his team arrived. “We’re all listening to Mark,” Bosworth said, “and on the back channel we’re all like: ‘Is this his new style? Are we commenting? Are we not commenting? How do we feel about it?’”

How Bosworth feels is, this is the authentic Zuckerberg. “He knows he’s going to be judged no matter what,” he said. So why not?

In this version of the story, Zuckerberg has been freed from the fetters of his self-imposed gray T-shirt prison. A less charitable view, however, is that his fashion glow-up has been so fortuitously timed that most people assumed it was a marketing choice created by a stylist. Rumor had it Karla Welch, who works with Tracee Ellis Ross and Sarah Paulson, was involved. This turned out to be false, though Welch sometimes works with Chan. Zuckerberg said he mostly styles himself. The multiprint Loewe shorts he wore during the Sun Valley conference? Totally his idea.

Fashion-wise, he seems to be experiencing a sort of delayed adolescence. “This is stuff we did in college, or in high school,” said the designer Mike Amiri, who helped Zuckerberg design his first high-fashion T-shirt, in 2024, with “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil” embroidered across the front, Latin for “all Zuck or all nothing.”

“You’re figuring out: ‘Am I a baggy fit guy? Am I a vintage type? Who am I?’” Amiri said. It’s just that Zuckerberg is doing it in his 40s, with unlimited resources.

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press; Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
[ed. Pathetic and clueless. See also: Why Does The Times Care About Mark Zuckerberg’s Style? (NYT).]

The Commenters

I’ve been a journalist for long enough to be familiar with most of the job’s occupational hazards. I’ve angered powerful people without a legal canopy to protect me. My cursor has hesitated over the Send buttons of emails containing invasive questions. I know what it’s like to be chewed out, to have your confidence flattened, to junk entire drafts and start over from scratch. And yet, for most of my career, I never did attract a personal troll.

In this line of work, having a troll is the opposite of having a fan. It’s someone out there—across the astral span of the internet—who has decided to keep tabs on what you publish with the singular intent of mocking everything you write. Since I never had one, I wondered if people like this had gone extinct alongside the rest of the web I used to know. After all, digital media, and its trademark pugnacious tone, is basically defunct. The linear rapport necessary for a blogger to become someone’s nemesis simply no longer applies; the written word is on life support. At least, that’s what I thought—until I discovered the Slate comments section. At last, I had finally found my haters.

Slate’s comments section is not prominently advertised on the homepage, and when I was hired as a staff writer in the spring of 2023, I didn’t know it existed. But, sure enough, all of the articles on the website are studded with a button shaped like a speech bubble. Click on it, and a discussion thread quietly materializes at the bottom of the screen, revealing one of the last few remaining active commenting communities hosted by a magazine. The section possesses a distinctly Web 1.0 architecture: There are no reaction GIFs or YouTube embeds, and posters tend to distinguish themselves with multisyllabic usernames. Trawling through the comments feels a little bit like exploring the sediment of cyberspace. As such, the core clientele—about 200 strong—is composed of people who have been visiting Slate for a very, very long time. They are some of our most dedicated readers. They’ve also despised pretty much everything I’ve ever written.

Comments sections are, by nature, snarky. The format was devised to be a digital version of the newspaper’s good old-fashioned Letters to the Editor page—itself a receptacle for readers to loudly hector the opinion columnists they found annoying. Once considered default features, many of those sections disappeared as digital media matured, mostly because editors determined them to be hotbeds of inanity and harassment. (Recently they’ve made something of a comeback—earlier this year, the Atlantic reintroduced a comments board after abolishing it in 2018.) But Slate’s comments section has survived, and it has retained its characteristically adversarial register to this day. The threads bloom with treatise-length complaints, exasperating grammatical pedantry, and the usual flame-war material. Anyone who has ever written professionally has contended with some version of this, but what surprised me about Slate’s community was just how closely read the taunts in the comments section tended to be—particularly when they were channeled in my direction. Sure, I’ve been hit with plenty of run-of-the-mill drive-bys—“I really hope my Slate Plus dollars aren’t paying this guy,” reads one comment to my 2024 story about men wearing chains—but other insults reveal a profound metatextual fluency in my entire oeuvre. It’s as if the commenters are reading my work voraciously with the specific intention of obliterating me.

In the autumn of 2023, as part of Slate’s long-running Human Guinea Pig column, I was tasked with donning a Mario costume and busking for change in Manhattan. I think the story turned out pretty well, but the incident has been cited, derisively, in the comments section of dozens of articles I’ve written since. “You’ve never forgiven him for putting on that Super Mario costume in Times Square,” read one, left by user Muffin the Mule, about a story published almost three years after the Mario adventure. When I checked the comments on a story I wrote in the spring about Tucker Carlson’s gonzo ballcaps, one read, “Do you think Winkie wears the hat with his gold chain?” In another, about plastic surgery, I wrote that I left the house dressed in a chambray shirt and salmon shorts. This fairly normal outfit offended one user so much that he has made sardonic references to it on multiple occasions in the comment box.

You get the idea. It is not just that I get roasted relentlessly—it is that the roasts are meticulously tailored, leading one to believe that making fun of Slate writers is, for the commenters, among the prime incentives for visiting the website. And I am far from the only person here to get that treatment. Slate contributors far and wide have endured their own bespoke wisecracks, and that has nurtured a, let’s say, complicated relationship with the magazine’s comment box among the staff. One colleague told me that her mother has occasionally taken up in the comments herself, slinging zingers back at the trolls on behalf of her daughter. (My mom has done this too—I imagine it’s among the main reasons she pays for a Slate Plus subscription.) Another co-worker told me that she ventures into the comments on extremely rare occasions, often as a self-loathing exercise. (“The last time I checked on them was two years ago when I wrote a piece I was convinced was terrible,” she said. “I knew someone in there would agree.”) But the person on staff who possesses, by far, the most comments-related trauma is Slate Jurisprudence editor Jeremy Stahl. In his early days at the magazine, Stahl was made a community moderator of the Fray—the venerated message board that Slate operated in the 2000s. Even in those days, Stahl remembers, the tenor of the comments was largely the same as it is now.

“It was, for a while, a very hostile, troll-y commenting community,” Stahl said. “They said some of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me. It was a bummer.”

This all brings me back to my personal troll. Unlike some of my fellow Slatesters, I’ve never felt especially victimized by the comments section. I have thick skin, and I’ll happily admit that I have a perverse fondness for the backlash that results from an incendiary blog. (I’m also white and male, which excludes me from some of the gnarlier flavors of trolldom.) But if I’m being honest, there is one user who has a unique talent for vexing me. He posts under the username Flexo, and he is the person who has picked on me the most during my time at the magazine. I’ve gotten to know his rancorous countenance well over the months and years, as my byline has become flush with essays. In fact, when I take my ambling scrolls into the comments section, my eyes instinctively seek out his name. I think I’m morbidly curious to see if I’ve finally won Flexo over. The answer—eternally—is no.

“This guy is far and away the worst writer I’ve ever read. I feel like I need to have a lime bath to disinfect myself after using the word ‘writer,’ ” wrote Flexo beneath the aforementioned Tucker Carlson piece.

“Don’t post here, it only encourages him,” he commented on a story I wrote about a viral dieting trend. “Winkie is a blight on what still passes for journalism,” he added.

“Never heard of him. Winkie is the worst.” This is Flexo one more time, offering his assessment on a profile I wrote about the right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Someone responded to him saying that I “like the obscure” in my writing subjects and enjoy “being on the edge of a movement.” To which Flexo countered: “A bowel movement?”

It goes without saying that Flexo and I have not met, nor have we ever spoken to each other. This is how it always is between a writer and their commenters, and as such, I’ve never been quite sure how to interpret the flavor of his smarm. Is my dear Flexo just an ordinary jerk? Is he trying to offer me some tough love? Did one thing gradually transform into the other? Really, all of those questions led me to another question: How much does Flexo hate me, really? The only thing I knew for sure is that, for better or worse, the people at the bottom of my articles—the ones responsible for the thousands of comments tapering off into an infinite scroll—are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most dedicated readers I’ve ever had, in a moment in media history when “having readers” is harder than ever. Despite all the negativity, a clear kinship exists between us. With Slate’s 30th anniversary around the corner, I wanted to get a better sense of their relationship with me—and the magazine as a whole.

That meant I needed to give Flexo a call.

*****

In order for this project to work, I needed to create a dossier of my biggest haters. Evan Urquhart, Slate’s veteran community manager, agreed to help. I gave him 30 usernames to help me track down. Urquhart seemed to do this out of love for the community he has helped steward for more than a decade. He struck a considerably different tone than Stahl did. I think he knew what I was up to.

“Our commenters are really funny, and really smart. Some of the meanness is more like their love language,” he told me. “Our community is made up of lovable, crotchety grumps. God bless them.”

And so, armed with my dossier, I fanned out dozens of emails to the denizens of the Slate comments section. This presented another challenge: Was I crossing some sacred line? Especially when the commenters in question have said so many nasty things about your work? I worried that seeing my name pop up in the commenters’ inboxes might come off a little intrusive, or perhaps even narclike—a fracturing of a trust. And seriously, I wasn’t here to settle scores. Instead, I told these commenters that I was working on a story about Slate’s longevity, and that I wanted to know what has kept them around the magazine across so many different eras. That was basically true, as far as I was concerned.

Flexo replied in less than 15 minutes.

“You sometimes drive me crazy, but I do love our community, and none of it would be possible without the writers,” wrote Flexo, striking a much more conciliatory tone than I had grown accustomed to. “We have a great community and it’s nice you recognize that. This was a very nice email to send.”

One week later, I jumped on the phone with him. After years orbiting around the exterior of the comment box—peering inside with macabre curiosity to witness the ways I’ve annoyed the regulars most recently—it felt a bit like making first contact.

Flexo, as it turns out, is a 62-year-old guy named Ron who lives in the Pacific Northwest. I learned that he holds a degree in physics from the University of Oregon, and that he worked as a professional musician for decades. He told me that he loves jazz, and onetime Slate staff writer Jamelle Bouie, and that he hated my longform feature about the Creed cruise. (It wasn’t about the writing, Flexo told me. He just can’t stand the band’s music.) Most importantly, I learned that he isn’t active on any forms of social media. Facebook bores him, and he doesn’t have accounts on Twitter or Bluesky. No, the only place that Flexo posts is the Slate comments, which he visits almost every day.

There is a long history of people, adrift in the frigid expanses of cyberspace, finding close fellowship in unexpected places—be it a niche subreddit, or a lonely Discord outpost, or the stately vestibules of World of Warcraft. The saga of Flexo, and the underbelly of Slate as a whole, is proof that the same dynamic can be replicated in a venue that exists primarily for readers to gripe about Dear Prudence letters. That makes it a testament to the tenacity of digital communion. For instance: Flexo has an Instagram account, but it is set to private, and he follows only 13 people—all of whom are fellow Slate commenters. They hang out sometimes, offline. (“I’m friends with several regulars,” he said.) Together, they work around the limited social features of our commenting interface—no direct messaging—by ferreting over burner emails to each other. (“It’s like a Slate-only email address,” Flexo said.) Failing that, Flexo is happy to treat Slate the same way you or I might treat Nextdoor. A few months ago, Flexo offered up a characteristically off-topic comment on a random Slate story complaining that one of his amps was on the fritz. Another user, who lived in Flexo’s area and had some mechanical know-how, replied, right there in the comments, offering his help.

“He wrote, ‘Swing the amp by my house, I can fix it,’ ” Flexo said. “I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” He was, and he took care of it.

All of this is to say that Flexo is not some nihilistic troll. His participation in Slate’s discourse isn’t driven by the arbitrary destructiveness of, say, the average Twitter shitposter. Flexo has an investment in Slate, mostly because without Slate, its comments section would cease to exist. This is the symbiosis that defines the community, and it’s also why former Slate staff writer Dan Kois always thought that the comments section might as well exist in a “different universe” from Slate proper. I get what he means: While the community relies on Slate’s infrastructure and is fluent in the magazine’s tone, the section also possesses its own hermetic culture—one replete with idiosyncratic norms and insulated memes, like a Petri dish embedded in the HTML of one of the few publications to survive the wipeout of digital media. As for why these folks have stuck around despite their occasionally acrimonious attitude toward Slate itself, Kois just thinks that’s an immutable reality of the internet. If you build it—if you provide a blinking text box and the chance to pester an author—they will come.

“It’s like that scene in Jurassic Park with Jeff Goldblum,” Kois said. “Life finds a way. Wherever there’s a little crack, they will flourish.”

by Luke Winkie, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Mark Alan Stamaty
[ed. I've often wondered about Comment Section personalities. What do they hope to accomplish? Maybe in this case just the name Winkie sets them off.]

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In Praise of Obsessive Men

One of my older brothers and I were very similar growing up. We were both good at school, both wore glasses, had similar colouring—unlike my other brother who was different. Yet there was one noticeable difference between my brother and me, which reflects a more general difference between the sexes. He was intensely and obsessively focused on whatever interested him at the time—to the exclusion of everything else, and I really mean everything else. I just wasn’t going to do this. I wanted to be “normal” and have a social life.

This sex difference is widely observed. Simon Baron Cohen points out in his book The Essential Difference that obsessive behaviour is common among autistic children, who are disproportionately male.

In the movie Rain Man, the autistic brother (played by Dustin Hoffman) is obsessed with statistics on airplane crashes. He knows crash statistics for all the airlines and is therefore only willing to fly on one, Qantas. A student once told me about the autistic man her church employed to police the church parking lot. He had memorized all the license plates of the cars that were allowed in the lot, and thus knew instantly when a car was parked there without permission, and even when a car was parked in the wrong space.

There is some evidence that this kind of intense, obsessive focus leads to extremely high-level achievement. Since males are more likely to display such focus, the high achievers tend to be male. One of my favorite examples relates to competitive Scrabble. Many women play Scrabble and are often better than their male counterparts. Yet the very highest levels of competitive Scrabble are dominated by men.

For example, the greatest competitive Scrabble player in history is Nigel Richards from New Zealand. He was World Champion in 2007, 2011, 2013, 2018 and 2019. He is a 15-time winner of the King’s Cup in Bangkok, the world’s biggest Scrabble competition. He also won the French World Scrabble Championship in 2015 and 2018, and the Spanish-language World Championship in 2024—despite not speaking those languages fluently beforehand.

Nigel Richards at a Scrabble tournament. Source.

How did he do this? Remarkably, he memorized whole dictionaries (not most people’s idea of a fun activity). But it illustrates the extraordinary intensity and obsessiveness that can produce exceptional achievement.

There is evidence that intense, obsessive focus produces extraordinary achievement in a variety of areas, not just Scrabble. There are the guitarists who spend hours playing guitar, the soccer players who are always at the training ground, the painters who spend all their time painting, the gamers who are never away from their console, and so on.

There is also anecdotal evidence that extraordinary scientific achievements come from people who are intensely and obsessively focused on what they do. In the divorce announcement in a local paper, the ex-wife of legendary physicist Richard Feynman complained that “her husband worked calculus problems all day, as soon as he arose, while he drove his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.”

And the movie Oppenheimer popularized the story of when the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was asked to deliver a physics lecture in Dutch (a language he did not speak). He locked himself in a room with a Dutch grammar book for a month and a half, and then delivered the lecture in pretty much flawless Dutch.

High-achieving scientists also tend to have very high IQs, but my point is not simply about IQ. Although high-achievers in many academic fields are disproportionately likely to be men, this is not necessarily because men are smarter. The evidence suggests that average IQ for males is about the same or perhaps slightly higher than average IQ for females. There is also evidence of a higher variance among men, which means there are more males in the far right and far left tails of the distributions (“more geniuses and more idiots,” as E. O. Wilson once memorably put it).

My point is that high-achievers, including high-achieving scientists, are more likely to be male because men are more likely to focus obsessively on their area of interest, and this helps them to rise to the top. They are also more willing to pay the costs of such intensive and obsessive focus, such as having your wife divorce you in the case of Feynman, or repelling people because of your inattention to personal hygiene, which I have been told is not uncommon at some technical schools.

by Rosemary Hopcroft, Aphoria | Read more:
Image:
[ed. Without conceding the point (see: Wikipedia: Women Achievers). So what? Men have different qualities than women (and vice versa). We should have more obsessives?]

The Id, the Ego and the Superintelligence

Panic around A.I. often focuses on whether machines will replace (or simply kill) us. But what the machines are often good at is a distinct set of tasks: Retrieval, near-instant summary and the frictionless, stunning recombination of everything that has already been said. What they are not good at is what philosophy has been training humans to do for thousands of years: judgment. And so the A.I. companies have started hiring philosophers. They don’t just consult them or wheel them out for an amusing after-dinner talk on the trolley problem; they actually hire them with salaries and, presumably, dental plans. A.I. companies need philosophers because actually thinking requires forgetting — and knowing when to forget. They need philosophers because of what their machines cannot do.

Judgment is not calculation. It is the capacity to weigh, to discriminate, to sense that one answer is true and another merely correct. It is taste, discernment and the knack of thinking sideways. It is refined only through experience — through error, embarrassment, boredom, grief and the occasional hangover. Meaning is derived from the fact that we are mortal: Things matter to us because we are going to die, and we know it. There can be no meaning in immortality. To borrow from my friend Christian Madsbjerg, I would like to propose a better Turing test than Turing’s: Can a machine experience social anxiety? Can it lie awake at 4 in the morning replaying the stupid thing it said at dinner? Call me when a chatbot does that. To be intelligent in the human sense, the machine would need to give a damn.

Enter the A.I. companies’ philosophers. Anthropic keeps a small squad on the payroll, among them Amanda Askell, whose doctoral thesis was on infinite ethics — the question of how to act well in a universe of infinite value — and whose job is to shape the character of the company’s machine. Google DeepMind has appointed the Cambridge philosopher Henry Shevlin to the newly minted post of “Philosopher,” a job title I have been trying and failing to secure for some 40 years. The OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman says his company consulted “hundreds of moral philosophers” in drawing up the principles behind ChatGPT. (That’s roughly the turnout of a middling philosophy conference.)

After a lifetime of being asked at parties what one actually does with a philosophy degree, I find this development almost unbearably funny. Why now? Because the questions the A.I. companies are stumbling into are not engineering questions. What should the machine say to the grieving, the lonely, the person typing into the void at 4 in the morning? What sort of character should it have — candid, flattering, evasive, kind? Could such a thing conceivably suffer, and would we owe it anything if it did? These are questions about what matters. The engineers, to their credit, have noticed that no quantity of computational capacity will settle them. Ethics, it turns out, cannot be scraped from the internet, because the internet is precisely the contemporary record of our failure to agree about ethics.

There is a further irony here, and it is an old one. Philosophy’s first recorded technology panic was about exactly the thing these machines have now perfected: Artificial memory. Toward the end of Plato’s “Phaedrus,” Socrates tells the story of the Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of numbers, geometry, astronomy, draughts and dice, who presents his masterpiece — writing — to Thamus, god-king of Egypt. This discovery, Theuth announces, will make the Egyptians wiser: It is a pharmakon, or remedy, for memory. Thamus is unpersuaded. Writing, he replies, will implant forgetfulness in the soul; people will trust the external marks and cease to remember from within; they will acquire the reputation of wisdom without the reality. Pharmakon, conveniently, also means poison. Every panic since — about the printing press, the novel, television, the smartphone, the chatbot — has been a footnote to Thamus, and the joke, of course, is that we know his warning against writing only because Plato wrote it down.

Seen from the “Phaedrus,” A.I. is not a rupture but a culmination, representing the final, most extravagant flowering of external memory, the remedy-poison swallowed whole. And this is where the difference between us and the machines cuts deepest. A.I. is a memory machine, the most magnificent ever devised. It forgets nothing. The human being, by contrast, is a forgetful animal. To make this happily oblivious creature remember — to make it capable of promises, debts and morality — required millenniums of discipline and frankly appalling cruelty. “If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. Conscience, on this view, is mnemonics with a whip.

Yet Nietzsche also prized what he called active forgetting, and considered it a form of strength, even of health. Forgetting is not a leaky bucket but a doorkeeper, closing the gates of consciousness so that something new can happen, so that experience can be digested rather than endlessly force-fed back to us. We forget, and we move on. Forgiveness, sleep, cheerfulness, second marriages, continuing to support Luton Town Football Club: All of it depends on the merciful erosion of the past.

Some years ago, I wrote a short book called “Memory Theatre” about a philosopher (kind of an even more awful version of me) who attempted total recall, arranging every scrap of his past in a vast mnemonic palace. It did not end well for him; it never does. A creature that could forget nothing would not be a superintelligence but a ruin, buried alive under its own archive. What we have built is, in a sense, an infinite archive that cannot mourn, cannot forgive and cannot let go, because it never lost anything in the first place. The machine remembers everything and therefore, oddly, nothing in particular. Nothing weighs more than anything else.

This is why philosophy matters rather more, not less, in the age of A.I. Not because philosophers can out-remember the machines — believe me, we cannot; I continually forget where I have parked my own arguments — but because philosophy is the discipline of knowing what to do with experience: What to keep, what to discard, what to laugh at, what to junk. Thinking is not the accumulation of everything but the art of judicious, active forgetting.

by Simon Critchley, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Flo Meissner

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You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits

One easy trick to make yourself smarter.

Most wisdom comes from tangible experience in our wide world. It comes from human relationships, from travel, from living and loving and fighting and falling in the dirt. There is little wisdom to be had from spending years and years reading stuff on the internet. A single hard-won lesson, though, which I have learned after wasting an embarrassing amount of time reading and writing about politics, may help to save you a good amount of angst.

You can just ignore the bad pundits. You don’t have to read them. You can just carry right on with your life.

You don’t have to talk about the bad pundits. You don’t have to engage with them. You don’t have to craft painstaking responses to their vapid arguments. You don’t have to take them seriously. Their existence creates no obligation for you. Each new piece they produce generates no appointment on your calendar. The law does not accord them any reservation on your attention. They have no inherent power over you. Instead, they get their power from you. You give it to them, for free. You, who fancy yourself their enemy, provide the fuel for their careers.

Instead of doing that, you are free not to do it.

“Ugh, the New York Times opinion page is so awful!” Don’t read it then. “I can’t stand the bullshit that Bret Stephens wrote!” Don’t read it then. “I hate the sanctimony of David Brooks! I hate the smugness of Matt Yglesias! I hate the fascists at the Wall Street Journal, the bootlickers at the Washington Post, and the clowns at the Free Press!”

Don’t read them then. Problem solved.

You may interpret this as me telling you to shelter yourself from challenging opinions. Not at all. I encourage everyone to read widely and freely. When you read widely and freely, you are able to familiarize yourself with the work of many people. What you will come to realize is that many or even most of those people are not worth reading. Some because they don’t have much to say, and others because they are consistently wrong in a way that, once you figure it out, allows you to project their opinions into the future without needing to constantly check in on them. You can move on. You gave them their audition, and they didn’t pass. Not many will! This is all as it should be. You have a limited amount of time to read and most of that time should be spent reading books and the second most time should be spent reading facts, such as news. Opinion writing that does not prove its value is crowding out other things that have a much higher chance of being worthwhile.

Why does this seem so hard for so many of us in practice? Because we are all haunted by the demons of prestige. Prestige, a false god, tells us that a person’s work is valuable because of their position, their title, rather than because of the work itself. In the case of certain powerful people, this may be true. (It’s worth knowing what Elon Musk and Donald Trump think because it may directly affect many lives, notwithstanding the fact that they are morons.) In the case of writers, however, this is always false. Good work is valuable and bad work is not. The understandable tendency of many people to use prestige as a heuristic to guide their reading often leads them down a dead end road of frustration. [...]

Writers must be taken seriously if the quality of their work demands it and if not, not. That’s it! There are many ways to be a worthwhile pundit. Some are experts on specific subjects, and some get access to very important people’s thoughts, and some are gifted at distilling many disparate ideas into a coherent whole, and some are funny, a quality which justifies itself. My point is not that famous pundits are never worth reading, but rather that they are never worth reading just because of who they are. Look at this transcript of Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat discussing their own careers. One thing you may notice is that both of these people have spent their entire adult lives doing nothing but sitting at a computer blogging. Does that mean that they don’t know anything? Not at all. Then again, does it mean they do know anything? Also no. “Winning the pundit lottery with a New York Times gig” tells you nothing about whether these people are worthy of your attention. They must earn your respect, and their right to your time, solely with the quality of their work. That’s all they have! And you can judge that for yourself. Any further temptation to check for them because of the positions they hold is an error of judgment, by you. [...]

The more subtle and substantial danger of patronizing idiot pundits is that the accumulated weight of attention that we grant them bestows them with actual influence, which they use to make the world worse, as you would expect. This is bad enough when it’s, you know, Matt Yglesias morphing into a Democratic Party power broker; it is even worse when it is a calculated political effort, of the sort that Rahm Emanuel is trying to pull off now by parlaying his stint as a monotonous Wall Street Journal columnist into a presidential campaign.

James Carville is a wheezing old coot. Why is he influential? Because we all pay attention to him! Also, Donald Trump. Think about it. Depriving this sort of person of the material benefits of having a large audience is a patriotic act.

If you are a genuine hate read connoisseur, I respect it. But if you are a regular person who finds yourself continually getting mad at the idiot pundits you continue to read—stop!

The idea that if you want to be a well informed person you are obligated to read all the stuff that certain prestigious writers and outlets publish is not much different from the idea that since McDonald’s is very popular, you are obligated to stop there and eat a Big Mac every day. To keep your finger on the pulse. This, just like the belief that you must read every Jonathan Chait story, will eventually give you a heart attack. Embrace ignorance of dreary idiocy. It is the kind of ignorance that makes you smarter.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation; and, Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses (HTW):]

***

"If you create things for the public, you will get yelled at by dumbasses. Indeed, this is the primary experience of being the sort of writer that I am. If you make a joke, they won’t get it. If you use sarcasm, they won’t detect it. If you exaggerate for effect, you will be taken literally, and if you try to be understated, you will be accused of a contemptible lack of urgency. If you make a reference, it will not be understood; if you choose one topic, they will wonder why you didn’t choose another; if you try to focus on one thing, they will ask why you didn’t focus on something else. Your high-minded arguments will be dismissed as inscrutable, your simple arguments will be dismissed as unsophisticated, and you, personally, will be dismissed as the sort of lightweight who should try getting a real job. Ever thought of that? [...]

America’s entire power structure has been taken over by the very same sort of dumbasses who have been yelling at all of us on the internet for years. Perhaps this was all foreordained from the very first day that email and message boards were invented. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is no need to look upon the dull, vindictive, racist monsters running our government as a new or inexplicable sort of villain. I see in them a much more familiar identity: internet commenters.

The shoddiness of their work, their love of spectacle, their constant speechifying, their disproportionate reaction to all setbacks, their dishonesty, their prejudices, their disdain for expertise, their willingness to trust quacks, their scapegoating of the less powerful, their embrace of performative gestures at the expense of substance, their misogyny, their ill-concealed social awkwardness funneled into needless displays of aggression—yes, this is all very much in character. The good news is that it is easy to diagnose this disease. The bad news is that if we don’t get it cleared up, our nation’s 250-year history will culminate in the same sort of recriminatory meltdown as an internet comment thread that spirals from “What did you do today?” to full Nazism with stunning speed."

How DraftKings Uses AI to Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose

About a year into his job as a data analyst at DraftKings, Jayden Butts received a new assignment.

The online gambling giant was spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year on promotional incentives: “free” betting money advertised through emails and phone alerts. But the company knew little about their effectiveness.

So in 2023, DraftKings took customer betting records and built a machine learning model, a form of artificial intelligence that seeks patterns in data, to answer the question: Who was more likely to respond to promotions by gambling — and losing — more?

Butts’ task was to test that model, prioritizing free bets and bonuses for those likely losers. Soon, a question began to gnaw at him: Aren’t many of these same people prone to addiction? “We are looking for traits and features that we can target that indicate a good investment,” he said. By strict financial logic, “the best investment would be a problem gambler.”

Butts had reason to be concerned. DraftKings makes money when gamblers lose money. And the model sought to identify those it could get to lose the most. It scored each customer based on their habits: The higher the score, the more money a gambler was likely to lose for each promotion offered.

Since Butts ran those tests, DraftKings has continued to hone its methods, using data science, to target losing gamblers with promotions that encourage more betting, according to six former employees who worked on them. At the same time, four other former employees said, DraftKings has stalled or squashed efforts to use similar technology to predict who might develop a gambling problem based on their betting activity.

Silicon Valley firms spent years analyzing every digital interaction to predict what will keep users clicking on advertisements. Now, as companies like DraftKings have made gambling accessible to millions on smartphones, they too have collected an extraordinary wealth of data.

An investigation by The New York Times shows what DraftKings has chosen to do — and not do — with that power.

The Times interviewed more than 40 former DraftKings employees and obtained internal research memos, presentations and Slack messages as well as betting records from experiments conducted on customers.

The documents show how the model Butts worked on analyzed dozens of data points for gamblers, including how frequently they played, their daily account balances and how much they typically lost compared with how much they bet. It also incorporated another model that calculated how likely a user was to stop gambling.

This betting data may also contain signs that a person is headed for trouble. Yet when employees developed a machine learning model that would have assigned users “risk scores,” the company sidelined it, according to two former employees who worked on that project.

In late 2024, DraftKings fired Butts for performance reasons, he said, amid a short blip in business that led some in the company to believe its promotional experiments weren’t working as intended. The company briefly paused some of its data science work — before revving back up again with a flurry of new machine learning projects.

Butts and five other former DraftKings employees who worked on promotional targeting told the Times they regretted building technology they now viewed as dangerous.

“It is as predatory as it sounds,” said a former DraftKings analyst who, like many interviewed for this article, requested anonymity because he feared retribution. “If you lose more, we give you more, so you keep playing more.” He quit in 2024. [...]

Promotions, which take on forms like a free bet, a “profit boost” or a deposit bonus, play a vital role in DraftKings’ business: The company brought in around $8.7 billion in gross revenue from sports and casino gamblers last year and gave out about $3 billion in promotions, according to research by Citizens Bank.

DraftKings and some competitors, including FanDuel, have boasted publicly about their use of customer data for promotions — without disclosing what those efforts entail. A DraftKings executive recently told investors that data science and analytics helped it improve its margins on promotion-driven sports bets by 13% in 2025 and that it used AI to personalize hundreds of millions of promotional dollars.

One former DraftKings data scientist who worked on promotions, Jacob Shulkin, said that they were effective because they took advantage of gamblers’ psychology. “I feel I’m getting free money,” he said, “but really, it’s dragging me back in.”

Several gamblers told the Times that promotions fueled their addictions. Bryan Biehl lost nearly $70,000 gambling online, more than half of it at DraftKings. Biehl recalled how in late 2024, when he started therapy for his addiction, his email inbox began to feel like a relapse risk.

“I would get flooded with bonuses and deposits,” Biehl said. “If you are in addiction, you are not going to say no.”

In the first two weeks of December 2024, Biehl received 40 promotions from DraftKings, emails show. He succumbed to temptation one last time on Christmas Day before putting himself on self-exclusion lists, which blocked him from gambling apps.[...]

DraftKings already had a system that weighed factors like a gambler’s skill, how much they bet and tax rates on gambling revenue in the state where they lived.

Figuring this out required machine learning. Unlike traditional data analytics, where researchers decide which patterns to look for, machine learning models can sift through hundreds of variables on their own to find combinations that help predict particular behaviors.

Data scientists had trained the new casino model on historical data. It was Butts’ job to test it on real customers. Each week, the model vacuumed up information about a user’s recent activity. The score it calculated was known internally as “elasticity,” a term borrowed from economics.

Users with below-average scores were deemed “inelastic” and marked for fewer incentives. The “elastic” bettors remained.

In September 2023, Butts tested using the elasticity model to influence promotions for about 5,000 casino players. He later expanded the tests to a larger population.

He initially thought DraftKings aimed to save money by avoiding people who were unlikely to be profitable. But he said his supervisors told him that the company did not want to reduce its promotional spending but rather to “redeploy” it. He understood this to mean the goal was to direct more promotions toward the biggest losers.

by Alex Klavens, Walt Bogdanich and Jenny Vrentas, Seattle Times/NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tony Luong/The New York Times

It Can't Be Real

This feels like an AI simulation. As if we’re all living in an edit created by the reprobates hiding among us, with their finite sense of civility and unlimited access to video-generating software.

Did that happen? Is this real?

That video that circulated across the algorithms of Texas Longhorns fans was clearly fake. The one with Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian backhand slapping sideline reporter Holly Rowe — deplorable “entertainment” that only those wallowing in the gutter of society would find amusing.

But was that really a scion of the Manning family and a room full of credentialed reporters laughing at that trash?

Yes, unfortunately. That was real.

Also, though the savagery depicted in the video was created by artificial intelligence, did the current face of a billion-dollar football enterprise actually disrespect an ESPN/ABC Hall of Fame broadcaster who won the Curt Gowdy Award in 2023, as though she were a YouTuber holding one of those budget wireless mics?

Unbelievable, but facts. That, also, was real.

“I saw the AI Edit of (Sark) slapping Holly Rowe.”

I asked Arch Manning if he’d seen any edits on TikTok or Twitter after the game, and his answer is gold. pic.twitter.com/70FnNCVEHb

— Evan Vieth (@EvanVieth) September 14, 2026

There was a time when meatheads would giggle at off-color jokes only while in the locker room, or at least in the sanctity of the group chat, because at least good sense would prevail and remind them that some punch lines aren’t suitable for public consumption. It wasn’t that long ago, either, when head coaches jacked up on adrenaline would fulfill their social contract by spitting out a couple of nothings to a sideline reporter — or, at least, express regret when they didn’t.

That kind of human decorum, however, is fading faster than someone can hit “send” on the latest AI-generated nonsense. And plummeting deeper than even Arch Manning’s likability.

I can’t tell which is worse: the phony clip depicting violence against a woman, or the real-life behavior displayed by Sarkisian, then Manning and a room of media members? Before they could edit themselves and add a glossy filter to their apologies, they showed the sordid bits of their individual characters for all to see.

What a weird couple of days in Texas. It’s almost as if the state’s content creator said “Screw it” and mixed a superedit of slop.

It started immediately after the No. 4 Longhorns’ 24-23 comeback victory over then-No. 1 Ohio State, their first home win over a top-ranked team in 76 years. Stunning! So stunned was Sarkisian that the 52-year-old coach completely forgot how to form big-boy words with his mouth. Instead of respecting the postgame interview process, Sarkisian blew off Rowe’s attempt to toss him congratulatory softballs.

Rowe was trying to do her job. Sarkisian, using the excuse of technical difficulties despite ABC’s production appearing ready for his on-field interview, did not do his.

pic.twitter.com/6ZVqJmIP2v
— Holly Rowe (@sportsiren) September 15, 2026

Yes, Sarkisian is contractually obligated to perform this duty — TV deals help fund his $11 million salary — as required by his conference’s multibillion-dollar media agreements with the networks that broadcast its games.

And no, just no: Screaming “Texas fight!” into the camera, and then leaving the reporter in the dust, does not satisfy this responsibility. Nor does it make for good television. More than anything else, it’s just not a good look.

Holly Rowe is not happy with Texas HC Steve Sarkisian

pic.twitter.com/L6etAq1k4Q
— Pick 6 Pack (@Pick6PackFB) September 13, 2026

Sarkisian makes too much money, has been around big-time college football too long to get annoyed when the TV reporter doesn’t hurry up and ask him the two questions. On the greatest night of his greatest coaching feat, Sarkisian acted without grace or a shred of tact. College coaches aren’t diplomats, but they can choose not to act like jerks. [...]

Bo French, a Republican running for Texas Railroad Commissioner, couldn’t get past all those pesky brown-skinned men invading the stands. Not just college kids, but Others cheering for Texas’ football team and snatching up Texas’ degrees. The sight of so few blond and blue-eyed coeds made the politician forget all about the Longhorns’ big night, and it instead made him thumb out his outrage and xenophobia on X.

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” a post from French’s account read.

Thank goodness plenty of non-cretins exist across Texas, including some within his own political party, and those folks spoke out against the post.

Then, after all of this, after the head coach was rude and the GOP candidate couldn’t mask his racism, the college quarterback found some low-vibration content to be, heh heh, so hilarious. As did some of the reporters on hand, who presumably confused a press room for an out-of-control frat house.

During a Monday media availability, a reporter asked Manning if he had seen any of the TikTok edits done off the game. Arch, the 22-year-old Manning whom the public truly knows little about other than that he plays quarterback like his famous uncles, offered that he saw “an AI edit of Sark’s interview.”

Immediately, a loud laughter from reporters.

“Y’all seen that one?” Manning asked.

More laughter.

“That’s a good one!” Manning said, smiling and then pointing at someone off camera in solidarity with the joke.

Again, laughter.

“Of him slapping Holly Rowe,” Manning confirmed.

Still, laughter in the room.

“Yeah, it’s hilarious,” Manning concluded, and somewhere his family’s public relations firm probably asked for a raise.

When a colleague sent me that clip Monday night, my reaction was disbelief: “Are we sure that arch video isn’t AI?”

I asked genuinely because never would I have thought that a Manning, no matter his age, would so clumsily stumble into such an unnecessary mistake. Rarely an hour goes by without Peyton and Eli filling our screens. Even Cooper, Arch’s father and the lesser-known Manning brother, presents well in commercials and interviews. The Mannings understand media. They are a media company in and of themselves. So, five-star Arch must have had a measure of training before entering the mainstream. He can read the line of scrimmage, but clearly the kid can’t read a room. Or maybe he was lured into his thoughtless comments because of the jocularity inside that room full of reporters.

Most likely, they were grown people with jobs who represent various media companies. So-called professionals. Disregard for one second the lack of judgment by those reporters, however, and consider: In what reality does an adult cackle over the depiction of a man assaulting a woman? 

By Tuesday, the desensitized reactions to a fake video led to some regrets in the real world. The reporter who asked the question and posted the video of Manning with the caption: “… his answer is gold,” issued an apology. He said he acted too hastily in trying to get the video up and made a mistake in judgment. Also, Manning posted his remorse with humility. He apologized to Rowe for what “she has personally had to deal with because of my comments.”

Manning’s apology post was indeed real. So was the very real disrespect Rowe faced from the moment she placed a microphone near Sarkisian, as was the actual post from a politician mistakenly trying to score points with the wrong people. All of it was real, which means AI isn’t ruining our world. Real people are doing just fine in that role.

by Candace Buckner, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: X/Twitter
[ed. The widespread crudeness we see these days can be attributed to one source, and it isn't AI. Let's Go Brandon! People who'd normally keep such low feelings to themselves, or share only with like-minded friends, now feel empowered to let their inner freak flags fly. From the comments:]

Stop making 22 year old men apologize to 60 year old women for goofing around

Hahahaha they made him talk to you? I feel so bad for this guy.

Are you gonna apologize now for storming off the field like a little baby when you didn't get your interview?

This is so sad. It was a cartoonish joke that was funny. The kid finally shows a little personality and you women attack him. Our society sucks.

[ed. "Our society sucks". Yes it does. In some places and with some people.]