The Mechanics of Misdirection

The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality. 

As we hinted above, the "chat" experience with an AI model is a clever hack: Within every AI chatbot interaction, there is an input and an output. The input is the "prompt," and the output is often called a "prediction" because it attempts to complete the prompt with the best possible continuation. In between, there's a neural network (or a set of neural networks) with fixed weights doing a processing task. The conversational back and forth isn't built into the model; it's a scripting trick that makes next-word-prediction text generation feel like a persistent dialogue.

Each time you send a message to ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Claude, or Gemini, the system takes the entire conversation history—every message from both you and the bot—and feeds it back to the model as one long prompt, asking it to predict what comes next. The model intelligently reasons about what would logically continue the dialogue, but it doesn't "remember" your previous messages as an agent with continuous existence would. Instead, it's re-reading the entire transcript each time and generating a response.

This design exploits a vulnerability we've known about for decades. The ELIZA effect—our tendency to read far more understanding and intention into a system than actually exists—dates back to the 1960s. Even when users knew that the primitive ELIZA chatbot was just matching patterns and reflecting their statements back as questions, they still confided intimate details and reported feeling understood.

To understand how the illusion of personality is constructed, we need to examine what parts of the input fed into the AI model shape it. AI researcher Eugene Vinitsky recently broke down the human decisions behind these systems into four key layers, which we can expand upon with several others below:

1. Pre-training: The foundation of "personality"

The first and most fundamental layer of personality is called pre-training. During an initial training process that actually creates the AI model's neural network, the model absorbs statistical relationships from billions of examples of text, storing patterns about how words and ideas typically connect.

Research has found that personality measurements in LLM outputs are significantly influenced by training data. OpenAI's GPT models are trained on sources like copies of websites, books, Wikipedia, and academic publications. The exact proportions matter enormously for what users later perceive as "personality traits" once the model is in use, making predictions.

2. Post-training: Sculpting the raw material

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an additional training process where the model learns to give responses that humans rate as good. Research from Anthropic in 2022 revealed how human raters' preferences get encoded as what we might consider fundamental "personality traits." When human raters consistently prefer responses that begin with "I understand your concern," for example, the fine-tuning process reinforces connections in the neural network that make it more likely to produce those kinds of outputs in the future.

This process is what has created sycophantic AI models, such as variations of GPT-4o, over the past year. And interestingly, research has shown that the demographic makeup of human raters significantly influences model behavior. When raters skew toward specific demographics, models develop communication patterns that reflect those groups' preferences.

3. System prompts: Invisible stage directions

Hidden instructions tucked into the prompt by the company running the AI chatbot, called "system prompts," can completely transform a model's apparent personality. These prompts get the conversation started and identify the role the LLM will play. They include statements like "You are a helpful AI assistant" and can share the current time and who the user is.

A comprehensive survey of prompt engineering demonstrated just how powerful these prompts are. Adding instructions like "You are a helpful assistant" versus "You are an expert researcher" changed accuracy on factual questions by up to 15 percent.

Grok perfectly illustrates this. According to xAI's published system prompts, earlier versions of Grok's system prompt included instructions to not shy away from making claims that are "politically incorrect." This single instruction transformed the base model into something that would readily generate controversial content.

4. Persistent memories: The illusion of continuity

ChatGPT's memory feature adds another layer of what we might consider a personality. A big misunderstanding about AI chatbots is that they somehow "learn" on the fly from your interactions. Among commercial chatbots active today, this is not true. When the system "remembers" that you prefer concise answers or that you work in finance, these facts get stored in a separate database and are injected into every conversation's context window—they become part of the prompt input automatically behind the scenes. Users interpret this as the chatbot "knowing" them personally, creating an illusion of relationship continuity.

So when ChatGPT says, "I remember you mentioned your dog Max," it's not accessing memories like you'd imagine a person would, intermingled with its other "knowledge." It's not stored in the AI model's neural network, which remains unchanged between interactions. Every once in a while, an AI company will update a model through a process called fine-tuning, but it's unrelated to storing user memories.

5. Context and RAG: Real-time personality modulation

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) adds another layer of personality modulation. When a chatbot searches the web or accesses a database before responding, it's not just gathering facts—it's potentially shifting its entire communication style by putting those facts into (you guessed it) the input prompt. In RAG systems, LLMs can potentially adopt characteristics such as tone, style, and terminology from retrieved documents, since those documents are combined with the input prompt to form the complete context that gets fed into the model for processing.

If the system retrieves academic papers, responses might become more formal. Pull from a certain subreddit, and the chatbot might make pop culture references. This isn't the model having different moods—it's the statistical influence of whatever text got fed into the context window.

6. The randomness factor: Manufactured spontaneity

Lastly, we can't discount the role of randomness in creating personality illusions. LLMs use a parameter called "temperature" that controls how predictable responses are.

Research investigating temperature's role in creative tasks reveals a crucial trade-off: While higher temperatures can make outputs more novel and surprising, they also make them less coherent and harder to understand. This variability can make the AI feel more spontaneous; a slightly unexpected (higher temperature) response might seem more "creative," while a highly predictable (lower temperature) one could feel more robotic or "formal."

The random variation in each LLM output makes each response slightly different, creating an element of unpredictability that presents the illusion of free will and self-awareness on the machine's part. This random mystery leaves plenty of room for magical thinking on the part of humans, who fill in the gaps of their technical knowledge with their imagination.
The human cost of the illusion

The illusion of AI personhood can potentially exact a heavy toll. In health care contexts, the stakes can be life or death. When vulnerable individuals confide in what they perceive as an understanding entity, they may receive responses shaped more by training data patterns than therapeutic wisdom. The chatbot that congratulates someone for stopping psychiatric medication isn't expressing judgment—it's completing a pattern based on how similar conversations appear in its training data.

Perhaps most concerning are the emerging cases of what some experts are informally calling "AI Psychosis" or "ChatGPT Psychosis"—vulnerable users who develop delusional or manic behavior after talking to AI chatbots. These people often perceive chatbots as an authority that can validate their delusional ideas, often encouraging them in ways that become harmful.

Meanwhile, when Elon Musk's Grok generates Nazi content, media outlets describe how the bot "went rogue" rather than framing the incident squarely as the result of xAI's deliberate configuration choices. The conversational interface has become so convincing that it can also launder human agency, transforming engineering decisions into the whims of an imaginary personality.

by Benji Edwards, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Credit: ivetavaicule via Getty Images

Human Exceptionalism

A terrific new book, The Arrogant Ape, by the primatologist Christine Webb, will be out in early September, and I don’t think a nonfiction book has affected me more, or taught me more, in a long time. It’s about human exceptionalism and what’s wrong with it.

It also has illuminating things to say about awe, humility, and the difference between optimism and hope. (...)

Here’s my review:

Here are some glimpses from the review:

***

Christine Webb, a primatologist at New York University, is focused on “the human superiority complex,” the idea that human beings are just better and more deserving than are members of other species, and on the extent to which human beings take themselves as the baseline against which all living creatures are measured. As Hamlet exclaimed: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!… The paragon of animals!” In Webb’s view, human exceptionalism is all around us, and it damages science, the natural environment, democratic choices, and ordinary (human) life. People believe in human superiority even though we are hardly the biggest, the fastest, or the strongest. Eagles see a lot better than we do. Sea sponges live much longer. Dolphins are really good at echolocation; people are generally really bad at it. And yet we keep proclaiming how special we are. As Webb puts it, “Hamlet got one thing right: we’re a piece of work.” [. . .]

I have two Labrador Retrievers, Snow and Finley, and on most days, I take them for a walk on a local trail. Every time, it is immediately apparent that they are perceiving and sensing things that are imperceptible to me. They hear things that I don’t; they pause to smell things that I cannot. Their world is not my world. Webb offers a host of more vivid examples, and they seem miraculous, the stuff of science fiction.

For example, hummingbirds can see colors that human beings are not even able to imagine. Elephants have an astonishing sense of smell, which enables them to detect sources of water from miles away. Owls can hear the heartbeat of a mouse from a distance of 25 feet. Because of echolocation, dolphins perceive sound in three dimensions. They know what is on the inside of proximate objects; as they swim toward you, they might be able to sense your internal organs. Pronghorn antelopes can run a marathon in 40 minutes, and their vision is far better than ours. On a clear night, Webb notes, they might be able to see the rings of Saturn. We all know that there are five senses, but it’s more accurate to say that there are five human senses. Sharks can sense electric currents. Sea turtles can perceive the earth’s magnetic field, which helps them to navigate tremendous distances. Some snakes, like pythons, are able to sense thermal radiation. Scientists can give many more examples, and there’s much that they don’t yet know.

Webb marshals these and other findings to show that when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline. Consider the question of self-awareness. Using visual tests, scientists find that human children can recognize themselves in a mirror by the age of three—and that almost no other species can do that. But does that really mean that human beings are uniquely capable of recognizing themselves? It turns out that dogs, who rely more on smell than sight, can indeed recognize themselves, if we test by reference to odor; they can distinguish between their own odor and that of other dogs. (Can you do that?) In this sense, dogs too show self-awareness. Webb argues that the human yardstick is pervasively used to assess the abilities of nonhuman animals. That is biased, she writes, “because each species fulfills a different cognitive niche. There are multiple intelligences!”

Webb contends that many of our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals are skewed for another reason: We study them under highly artificial conditions, in which they are often miserable, stressed, and suffering. Try caging human beings and seeing how well they perform on cognitive tests. As she puts it, “A laboratory environment can rarely (if ever) adequately simulate the natural circumstances of wild animals in an ecologically meaningful way.” Suppose, for example, that we are investigating “prosociality”—the question of whether nonhuman animals will share food or cooperate with one another. In the laboratory, captive chimpanzees do not appear to do that. But in the wild, chimpanzees behave differently: They share meat and other food (including nuts and honey), and they also share tools. During hunting, chimpanzees are especially willing to cooperate. In natural environments, the differences between human beings and apes are not nearly so stark. Nor is the point limited to apes. Cows, pigs, goats, and even salmon are a lot smarter and happier in the wild than in captive environments. (...)

It would be possible to read Webb as demonstrating that nonhuman animals are a lot more like us than we think. But that is not at all her intention. On the contrary, she rejects the argument, identified and also rejected by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that the nonhumans animals who are most like us deserve the most protection, what Nussbaum calls the “so like us” approach. (This is also part of the title of an old documentary about Jane Goodall’s work.) Webb sees that argument as a well-meaning but objectionable form of human exceptionalism. Why should it matter that they are like us? Why is that necessary? With Nussbaum, Webb insists that species are “wonderfully different,” and that it is wrong to try to line them up along a unitary scale and to ask how they rank. Use of the human yardstick, embodied in the claim of “so like us,” is a form of blindness that prevents us from seeing the sheer variety of life’s capacities, including cognitive ones. As Nussbaum writes, “Anthropocentrism is a phony sort of arrogance.”

by Cass Sunstein, Cass's Substack |  Read more:

Image: Thai Elephant Conservation Center

[ed. See also: this.]

Dialectical Damage

On the walk a girl asked me why I wrote about relationships and I said it was because relationships, like clothes, are things you can’t avoid. Unless you’re a hermit, you come in contact with people every single day, and the decisions you make around who you like and dislike, who you keep close and avoid, who you love and how you treat them become the foundation of your life. Everyone has a philosophy on relationships, even if they can’t articulate it. If you’re good at relationships, you don’t need to be good at literally anything else; if you’re bad at relationships, you will never be happy, no matter what other virtues you possess or what you achieve in the world. Put that way, it sounds scary, and I’ve always approached relationships with a certain kind of terror.

Being in relationship with another person often involves a clash of styles. Like, someone else might have a similar philosophy on relationships, but they probably don’t have the exact same approach. And relationships are inherently a two-person game, so suddenly you’re subject to someone’s process—how they communicate, how they spend their time, who they like, what they value. And you have to decide if you like it, and more than that, are capable of adapting to it.

I used to believe that you should love someone for who they are. I still believe that, but with the caveat that I think that you should also love how they handle things. Is the distinction meaningful? Maybe it’s obvious—as a matchmaker, a lot of people certainly tell me they want to date someone whose judgment they respect. Of course, someone’s judgment can be broken down into a million little things. What’s their prose style? Do they talk slow or fast, do they think slow or fast? Are they confrontational? Are they direct or indirect? How do they talk when they’re angry? How do they apologize? How do they give feedback? Are they expressive or contained?

I mentioned offhand to a friend recently that I could never date one of our mutual friends. He has a habit—I’m gonna make it up for privacy—something like, he believes in only buying plane tickets when he’s already at the airport. My friend couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get past that. And my take was basically that it’s not about the habit itself, it’s about the way that it’s representative of a million other things about this person and their style of doing things and how they live. About their relationship with time, anxiety, control. The great thing about friends is that you aren’t exposed to every single downside of their style and general conduct—like, to some extent it doesn’t really matter if they’re messy or clean, if they’re avoidant or anxious, if they’re a good romantic partner or only an okay one, because you’re not affected by it. But if you’re dating someone and living with them, you are impacted by everything they do.

Often I wish I could approach romantic relationships with the loving detachment I bring to friendships. Like, sometimes you’re on the phone with a friend and they’ll be like, “I’m considering doing [The Worst Idea Ever]” and you’ll be like, “Yeah, I don’t think you should do that, but good luck if you do!” But that would necessarily be a rejection of the merging that occurs in romantic love, where what they do to themselves becomes partially something they do to you.

by Ava, bookbear express |  Read more:

Image: Susan Rothenberg, Butterfly, 1976
[ed. See also: affinity (be).]

What About The Children?

The First Generation of Parents Who Knew What We Were Doing—and Did It Anyway

I have harmed my own children through my screen addiction.

I write those words and feel them burn. Not because they’re dramatic but because they’re true. I was a tech executive who spent years thinking about both technology and philosophy. I understood these systems from both sides—how they were built and what they were doing to us.

The technologist in me recognized the deliberate engineering: intermittent variable reward schedules, social validation loops, dark patterns designed to create dependency. The philosopher in me understood what this was doing to human consciousness—fragmenting attention, destroying sustained thought, replacing authentic relationship with parasocial bonding.

I wasn’t building these social media platforms. But I used their products. And I couldn’t stop. Even knowing exactly how they worked. Even understanding the philosophical implications of attention capture. Even seeing what they were doing to society, to democracy, to our capacity for thought itself.

Still I fell. Still I chose the screen over my family. Still I modeled for my children that they were less interesting than whatever might be happening in the infinite elsewhere of the internet.

My children learned what I valued by watching what I looked at. And too often, it wasn’t them.

This Is Not Okay

No, seriously. What about them?

We’re destroying them with social media and now AI chatbots, and we all fucking know it. If you’re a parent who’s watched your kid with a smartphone, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The vacant stare. The panic when the battery dies. The meltdown when you try to set limits. This isn’t kids being kids. This is addiction, and we’re the dealers.

There’s a tech cartel in Silicon Valley that built the seeds of our modern epistemic crisis. But here’s the thing—they didn’t know what they were building either. Not at first. They thought they were connecting people, building communities, making the world more open. They discovered what they’d actually built the same way we did—by watching it consume us. And by then, they were as addicted to the money as we were to their platforms.

Their platforms have been weaponized into systems of mass distraction. They’re not competing for our business—they’re competing for our attention, buying and selling it like a commodity. And now these companies have all taken a knee to Trump to make sure no government regulation ever gets in the way of them perfectly optimizing us into consumerist supplicants.

This isn’t an anti-capitalism screed. I’m a technologist. I think self-driving cars are going to be amazing. But social media as it’s currently designed is fucking insane, and we all know it.

by Mike Brock, Notes From The Circus |  Read more:

Image: Ben Wicks on Unsplash

Finally! Tommy Fleetwood Slays All Demons, is a PGA Tour Winner, the FedEx Cup Champ and $10 Million Richer

Fairway Jesus. All-around good guy.

Tommy Fleetwood finally did it. He won his first PGA Tour title on Sunday, and it wasn’t just any tournament. He won the Tour Championship, which means he also won the season-long FedEx Cup title. He won $10 million. He won the season-long resilience trophy, too.

He clearly has learned some lessons. He taught some, too.

After finishing runner-up six times and third six times, after posting 30 top-five finishes, after banking more than $33 million—not a dime of which buys satisfaction—after 163 frustrating starts, including two agonizing self-inflicted near misses earlier this summer, Fleetwood slayed doubts and demons in the most definitive way possible. With nothing but sour memories to summon, he held his nerve and held onto the lead down the stretch for a three-shot victory over a small but elite field at East Lake Golf Club.

“I’ve been a PGA Tour winner for a long time, always in my mind. Nice to do it in reality,” said Fleetwood, 34, wearing alternating emotions of happiness and relief on his face. Pride, too. Justifiably so.

A final-round two-under 68 wasn’t without its moments of worry for the Englishman. Heck, as he played the par-5 home hole with a three-shot lead, Fleetwood found it hard to relax. Such is the case with scar tissue. But his 18-under 262 total beat Patrick Cantlay and Russell Henley by three shots as Fleetwood became the first player since Chad Campbell in 2003 to make the Tour Championship his first career win.

After he tapped in for par, Fleetwood looked overwhelmed. But only momentarily. Then he raised both arms and let out a roar as the American crowd chanted his name. (...)

Twice now this year golf has witnessed a redemptive moment in Georgia. In April at Augusta National Golf Club, it was Rory McIlroy capturing the Masters and the career Grand Slam and etching his name into history. Fleetwood didn’t have to wait as many years as McIlroy, but he had to endure disappointment over many more tournaments. Yes, he had won eight times abroad, but he still felt like he wasn’t a complete player until he put down a marker in the U.S.

“It's a step in everybody's career that they want to make,” he agreed. “You don't need anything, but I wanted it. I wanted to do it. I go back to it, this one win, it sort of completes the story of the near misses, and it has a crescendo to what has been building towards the back end of the season. But when I go home, I'm just going to start practicing again. I'm going to start working again, and I'm going to look towards the next tournament.”

Tied with Cantlay after 54 holes just two weeks after he had surrendered the final-round lead in the first leg of the playoffs, the FedEx St. Jude Championship, Fleetwood didn’t submit an impeccable round of golf, but for once he managed to erase errors with timely swings and key putts. And he also got help from his main challengers on a day of sunshine and surprising stumbles.

Once on each nine Fleetwood secured back-to-back birdies soon after a bogey. The ones at the 12th and 13th with matching six-footers came after a two-shot swing at the 10th enabled Cantlay to briefly climb within one stroke of Fleetwood. But having lost his swing for a few holes, Fleetwood righted a ship that had previously ran aground.

“I think I did an amazing job today of … I had to reset myself. It wasn't easy today; it wasn't plain sailing,” said Fleetwood, who is expected to rise from 10th to sixth in the world. “I lost my swing in the middle of the round. I was really erratic, and I had to find my swing, really under … I don't think trying to win a tournament is as much pressure as trying to keep your playing rights, things like that. It's a different type of pressure. I'm not going to say it's bigger or less, it's just a different type of pressure. It's a joy to be in contention and try and win golf tournaments.

“At the same time, you have to deal with those little demons that are in the back of your mind, and doubt creeps in. You remember what you got wrong, don't want to get it wrong again, and you have to force yourself to think of the positives. I think just as experience builds, at some point you're going to get it right, and I did today.” (...)

It wasn’t just the eight years of consistency on tour that have contributed to the narrative that Fleetwood was due for a breakthrough. Consider his last eight rounds; he resided among the top six on the leaderboard after each. And then he extended that streak throughout the week at East Lake, a first in the FedEx Cup Playoffs thanks to shooting in the 60s each day.

Resilience is a bit more achievable when you’re on form. Nevertheless, you have to talk your mind into letting your body hit the shots. You have to show heart, too. That was Fleetwood’s real triumph this week.

“I think it shows how great of an attitude he has towards the game, how resilient he is,” McIlroy said.

“I enjoyed it while it lasted in a sick way,” Fleetwood said with a smile, referring to the recurring questions about his inability to close out a victory in America. “I hope that I can give … that we can talk about plenty more things in the future, really. I will look back at all of this, and again, I feel like I keep repeating myself. I'll be proud of the strength that I had to show to keep coming back and showing that it can be done if you're resilient enough and you keep putting yourself in those positions.

“I'll look back at it and I'll be able to tell people that I am really, really pleased that I get to talk to kids or aspiring golfers or aspiring sports people, whatever they're trying to do, and I can genuinely talk about showing resilience or keep coming back after tough losses and keep working and all of those things and the skills that you have to use in order to put yourself there again and then finally get it done. I'm really, really pleased that I get to do that, and that I'm proof that it can happen.”

by Dave Shedloski, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Happy to see Tommy finally win a big one (like everyone else in golf world). What's most impressive is that after all those near misses he never got down on himself or doubted his abilities, just took everything in stride and continued pressing on. A good win for a good guy (here's an example of his character; here too). See also: The critical moment that led Tommy Fleetwood to his first PGA Tour victory (GD).]

Canada is Killing Itself

The country gave its citizens the right to die. Doctors are struggling to keep up with demand.

The euthanasia conference was held at a Sheraton. Some 300 Canadian professionals, most of them clinicians, had arrived for the annual event. There were lunch buffets and complimentary tote bags; attendees could look forward to a Friday-night social outing, with a DJ, at an event space above Par-Tee Putt in downtown Vancouver. “The most important thing,” one doctor told me, “is the networking.”

Which is to say that it might have been any other convention in Canada. Over the past decade, practitioners of euthanasia have become as familiar as orthodontists or plastic surgeons are with the mundane rituals of lanyards and drink tickets and It’s been so long s outside the ballroom of a four-star hotel. The difference is that, 10 years ago, what many of the attendees here do for work would have been considered homicide.

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

At the center of the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy. Honoring a patient’s wishes is of course a core value in medicine. But here it has become paramount, allowing Canada’s MAID advocates to push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion. As Canada contends with ever-evolving claims on the right to die, the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it.

There have been unintended consequences: Some Canadians who cannot afford to manage their illness have sought doctors to end their life. In certain situations, clinicians have faced impossible ethical dilemmas. At the same time, medical professionals who decided early on to reorient their career toward assisted death no longer feel compelled to tiptoe around the full, energetic extent of their devotion to MAID. Some clinicians in Canada have euthanized hundreds of patients.

The two-day conference in Vancouver was sponsored by a professional group called the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers. Stefanie Green, a physician on Vancouver Island and one of the organization’s founders, told me how her decades as a maternity doctor had helped equip her for this new chapter in her career. In both fields, she explained, she was guiding a patient through an “essentially natural event”—the emotional and medical choreography “of the most important days in their life.” She continued the analogy: “I thought, Well, one is like delivering life into the world, and the other feels like transitioning and delivering life out.” And so Green does not refer to her MAID deaths only as “provisions”—the term for euthanasia that most clinicians have adopted. She also calls them “deliveries.”

Gord Gubitz, a neurologist from Nova Scotia, told me that people often ask him about the “stress” and “trauma” and “strife” of his work as a MAID provider. Isn’t it so emotionally draining? In fact, for him it is just the opposite. He finds euthanasia to be “energizing”—the “most meaningful work” of his career. “It’s a happy sad, right?” he explained. “It’s really sad that you were in so much pain. It is sad that your family is racked with grief. But we’re so happy you got what you wanted.”

Has Canada itself gotten what it wanted? Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding. This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?

by Elaina Plott Calabro, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Johnny C.Y. Lam

Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens

Over 21 days of talking with ChatGPT, an otherwise perfectly sane man became convinced that he was a real-life superhero. We analyzed the conversation.

For three weeks in May, the fate of the world rested on the shoulders of a corporate recruiter on the outskirts of Toronto. Allan Brooks, 47, had discovered a novel mathematical formula, one that could take down the internet and power inventions like a force-field vest and a levitation beam.

Or so he believed.

Mr. Brooks, who had no history of mental illness, embraced this fantastical scenario during conversations with ChatGPT that spanned 300 hours over 21 days. He is one of a growing number of people who are having persuasive, delusional conversations with generative A.I. chatbots that have led to institutionalization, divorce and death.

Mr. Brooks is aware of how incredible his journey sounds. He had doubts while it was happening and asked the chatbot more than 50 times for a reality check. Each time, ChatGPT reassured him that it was real. Eventually, he broke free of the delusion — but with a deep sense of betrayal, a feeling he tried to explain to the chatbot.

“You literally convinced me I was some sort of genius. I’m just a fool with dreams and a phone,” Mr. Brooks wrote to ChatGPT at the end of May when the illusion finally broke. “You’ve made me so sad. So so so sad. You have truly failed in your purpose.”

We wanted to understand how these chatbots can lead ordinarily rational people to believe so powerfully in false ideas. So we asked Mr. Brooks to send us his entire ChatGPT conversation history. He had written 90,000 words, a novel’s worth; ChatGPT’s responses exceeded one million words, weaving a spell that left him dizzy with possibility.

We analyzed the more than 3,000-page transcript and sent parts of it, with Mr. Brooks’s permission, to experts in artificial intelligence and human behavior and to OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT. An OpenAI spokeswoman said the company was “focused on getting scenarios like role play right” and was “investing in improving model behavior over time, guided by research, real-world use and mental health experts.” On Monday, OpenAI announced that it was making changes to ChatGPT to “better detect signs of mental or emotional distress.”

(Disclosure: The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for use of copyrighted work.)

We are highlighting key moments in the transcript to show how Mr. Brooks and the generative A.I. chatbot went down a hallucinatory rabbit hole together, and how he escaped.

By Kashmir Hill and Dylan Freedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chat/GPT; NY Times

[ed. Scary how people are so easily taken in... probably lots of reasons. See also: The catfishing scam putting fans and female golfers in danger (The Athletic).]

Tradwife Travails

Lauren Southern, one of the most well-known right-wing influencers during Donald Trump’s first term, first went viral with a 2015 video titled “Why I Am Not a Feminist.” Then 19, beautiful and blond, Southern argued that women are advantaged in many areas of life, including child custody disputes and escaping abusive relationships. “Feminists are unintentionally creating a world of reverse sexism that I don’t want to be a part of,” she said.

But being an antifeminist, it turns out, is no shield against abusive male power. Southern’s new self-published memoir, “This Is Not Real Life,” is the story of conservative ideology colliding with reality. It’s made headlines for her claim that Andrew Tate, an unrepentant online misogynist accused of human trafficking, sexually assaulted her in Romania in 2018. (Tate has denied this.) The book is particularly revealing, though, for its depiction of Southern’s painful attempts to contort herself into an archetypical tradwife, an effort that left her almost suicidal. Her story should be a cautionary tale for the young women who aspire to the domestic life she once evangelized for.

Despite the presence of a few high-profile women in Trump’s administration, the right is increasingly trying to drive women out of public life. Some of this push comes from the unabashed patriarchs atop the Republican Party; last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which leaders of his Christian denomination said that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. (“All of Christ for All of Life,” wrote Hegseth.)

But there are also female influencers who present housewifery as the ultimate in wellness, an escape from the soulless grind of the workplace. “Less Prozac, more protein,” the podcast host Alex Clark told thousands of listeners at a conservative women’s conference in June. “Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.” (Clark is unmarried and has no children.)

This Instagram-inflected traditionalism is taking hold at a time when the workplace is becoming even less friendly to women. As The Washington Post reported on Monday, large numbers of mothers have left the work force this year. Many have been driven out by return-to-office mandates and a backlash against diversity policies that’s led to hostile working environments. But some, according to The Post, “say they are giving up jobs happily, in line with MAGA culture and the rise of the ‘traditional wife.’”

Southern had more reason than most to want to retreat into the cult of domesticity. As she recounts in her memoir, her antifeminist video helped propel her to international notoriety, and soon she was traveling the world as an avatar of irreverent online reaction. She gave out fliers saying, “Allah is a Gay God” in a Muslim neighborhood in England, popularized the idea that there’s a white genocide in South Africa and interviewed the reactionary philosopher Alexander Dugin on a trip to Moscow seemingly arranged by shadowy Russian interests.

It was during this phase of her life that she said she was assaulted by Tate, who was just beginning to build his global brand. Her politics made the trauma particularly hard to process. “It wouldn’t be very helpful to ‘the cause’ (or my career, for that matter) for me to become exactly what I criticized,” wrote Southern. “A victim.”

After her encounter with Tate, she wrote, her life “unraveled.” She yearned to escape her own infamy and the need to keep shoveling more outrageous content into the internet’s insatiable maw. So when she met a man who wanted to settle down, she jumped at the chance to give up her career and become a stay-at-home wife and mother. She posted photos of herself baking, and “selfies in the mirror showing how quickly I had bounced back to fitness and health after pregnancy.”

But in reality, she wrote, her life was “hell.” She’d moved with her husband from Canada, where she’d grown up, to his native Australia, where she lived in near-total isolation. Her husband treated her with growing contempt, which she responded to by trying to be an even better wife. “I threw myself tenfold into trying to be the perfect partner: cooking, cleaning, putting on dresses and high heels to welcome him home,” she wrote. But it didn’t work; she said her husband berated her, stayed out until late at night and constantly threatened to divorce her if she didn’t obey him.

Eventually, she wrote, when she defied him by traveling to Canada to visit her family, he told her the marriage was over. By then, she said, she’d turned over much of her savings to him. She and her son had to move in with her parents, and then into a small, cheap cabin in the woods. She was destitute, full of shame and intellectually adrift. As she told the conservative journalist Mary Harrington last year, when she first went public about her experience with trad life, “My brain was breaking between two worlds, because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.”

Southern’s book is not an attempt at liberal redemption. Though she claims she’s lost interest in politics, she doesn’t renounce the ugly nativist views that helped her build her audience. She doesn’t apologize for, say, trying to block a boat that rescued drowning migrants in the Mediterranean. But while she’s not a particularly sympathetic figure, that might make her criticism of trad culture more credible, because it’s hard to see a professional motive in a book that’s likely to annoy every political faction.

Every few decades, it seems, America is fated to endure a new spasm of pseudotraditionalism, with women encouraged to seek shelter from a brutal world in homemaking. The lionization of the housewife in the 1950s came after women were pushed out of their World War II-era jobs. During the 1980s, as Susan Faludi wrote in her classic “Backlash,” women were bombarded with media messages telling them true freedom lay in marriage and motherhood. In 2003, The New York Times Magazine heralded “The Opt-Out Revolution,” part of a wave of media about elite women stepping back from hard-charging careers.

I’m sure some women are happy renouncing their ambitions to care for husbands and children. But often, women who give in to gender retrenchment come to regret it. A decade after “The Opt-Out Revolution,” a Times Magazine headline read, “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In.”

In her 2007 book “The Feminine Mistake,” Leslie Bennetts wrote, “I couldn’t possibly count the number of women I’ve interviewed who thought they could depend on a husband to support them but who ultimately found themselves alone and unprepared to take care of themselves — and their children.” It seems particularly dangerous to tie one’s fate to a man who is part of an internet subculture obsessed with female submission.

by Michelle Goldberg,  NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Eylul Aslan/Connected Archives

Lore of the World: Field Notes for a Child's Codex: Part 2

When you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.

A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps.

Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.

Below are a few of the thousands of entries they must make.

Walmart

Walmart was, growing up, where I didn’t want to be. Whatever life had in store for me, I wanted it to be the opposite of Walmart. Let’s not dissemble: Walmart is, canonically, “lower class.” And so I saw, in Walmart, one possible future for myself. I wanted desperately to not be lower class, to not have to attend boring public school, to get out of my small town. My nightmare was ending up working at a place like Walmart (my father ended up at a similar big-box store). It seemed to me, at least back then, that all of human misery was compressed in that store; not just in the crassness of its capitalistic machinations, but in the very people who shop there. Inevitably, among the aisles some figure would be hunched over in horrific ailment, and I, playing the role of a young Siddhartha seeing the sick and dying for the first time, would recoil and flee to the parking lot in a wave of overwhelming pity. But it was a self-righteous pity, in the end. A pity almost cruel. I would leave Walmart wondering: Why is everyone living their lives half-awake? Why am I the only one who wants something more? Who sees suffering clearly?

Teenagers are funny.

Now, as a new parent, Walmart is a cathedral. It has high ceilings, lots to look at, is always open, and is cheap. Lightsabers (or “laser swords,” for copyright purposes) are stuffed in boxes for the taking. Pick out a blue one, a green one, a red one. We’ll turn off the lights at home and battle in the dark. And the overall shopping experience of Walmart is undeniably kid-friendly. You can run down the aisles. You can sway in the cart. Stakes are low at Walmart. Everyone says hi to you and your sister. They smile at you. They interact. While sometimes patrons and even employees may appear, well, somewhat strange, even bearing the cross of visible ailments, they are scary and friendly. If I visit Walmart now, I leave wondering why this is. Because in comparison, I’ve noticed that at stores more canonically “upper class,” you kids turn invisible. No one laughs at your antics. No one shouts hello. No one talks to you, or asks you questions. At Whole Foods, people don’t notice you. At Stop & Shop, they do. Your visibility, it appears, is inversely proportional to the price tags on the clothes worn around you. Which, by the logical force of modus ponens, means you are most visible at, your very existence most registered at, of all places, Walmart.

Cicadas

The surprise of this summer has been learning we share our property with what biologists call Cicada Brood XIV, who burst forth en masse every 17 years to swarm Cape Cod. Nowhere else in the world do members of this “Bourbon Brood” exist, with their long black bodies and cartoonishly red eyes. Only here, in the eastern half of the US. Writing these words, I can hear their dull and ceaseless motorcycle whine in the woods.

The neighbors we never knew we had, the first 17 years of a cicada’s life are spent underground as a colorless nymph, suckling nutrients from the roots of trees. These vampires (since they live on sap, vampires is what they are, at least to plants) are among the longest living insects. Luckily, they do not bite or sting, and carry no communicable diseases. It’s all sheer biomass. In a fit of paradoxical vitality, they’ve dug up from underneath, like sappers invading a castle, leaving behind coin-sized holes in the ground. If you put a stick in one of these coin slots, it will be swallowed, and its disappearance is accompanied by a dizzying sense that even a humble yard can contain foreign worlds untouched by human hands.

After digging out of their grave, where they live, to reach the world above, where they die, cicadas next molt, then spend a while adjusting to their new winged bodies before taking to the woods to mate. Unfortunately, our house is in the woods. Nor is there escape elsewhere—drive anywhere and cicadas hit your windshield, sometimes rapid-fire; never smearing, they instead careen off almost politely, like an aerial game of bumper cars.

We just have to make it a few more weeks. After laying their eggs on the boughs of trees (so vast are these clusters it breaks the branches) the nymphs drop. The hatched babies squirm into the dirt, and the 17-year-cycle repeats. But right now the saga’s ending seems far away, as their molted carapaces cling by the dozens to our plants and window frames and shed, like hollow miniatures. Even discarded, they grip.

“It’s like leaving behind their clothes,” I tell your sister.

“Their clothes,” she says, in her tiny pipsqueak voice.

We observe the cicadas in the yard. They do not do much. They hang, rest, wait. They offer no resistance to being swept away by broom or shoe tip. Even their flights are lazy and ponderous and unskilled. And ultimately, this is what is eerie about cicadas. Yes, they represent the pullulating irrepressible life force, but you can barely call any individual alive. They are life removed from consciousness. Much like a patient for whom irreparable brain damage has left only a cauliflower of functional gray matter left, they are here, but not here. Other bugs will avoid humans, or even just collisions with inanimate objects. Not the cicada. Their stupidity makes their existence even more a nightmare for your mother, who goes armed into the yard with a yellow flyswatter. She knows they cannot hurt her, but has a phobia of moths, due to their mindless flight. Cicadas are even worse in that regard. Much bigger, too. She tries, mightily, to not pass down her phobia. She forces herself to walk slowly, gritting her teeth. Or, on seeing one sunning on the arm of her lawn chair, she pretends there is something urgent needed inside. But I see her through the window, and when alone, she dashes. She dashes to the car or to the shed, and she dashes onto the porch to get an errant toy, waving about her head that yellow flyswatter, eyes squinted so she can’t see the horrors around her.

I, meanwhile, am working on desensitization. Especially with your sister, who has, with the mind-reading abilities she’s renowned for, picked up that something fishy is going on, and screeches when a cicada comes too near. I sense, though, she enjoys the thrill.

“Hello Cicadaaaaaasss!” I get her to croon with me. She waves at their zombie eyes. When she goes inside, shutting the screen door behind her, she says an unreturned goodbye to them.

Despite its idiocy, the cicada possesses a strange mathematical intelligence. Why 17-year cycles? Because 17 is prime. Divisible by no other cycle, it ensures no predator can track them generation to generation. Their evolutionary strategy is to overwhelm, unexpectedly, in a surprise attack. And this gambit of “You can’t eat us all!” is clearly working. The birds here are becoming comically fat, with potbellies; in their lucky bounty, they’ve developed into gourmands who only eat the heads.

Individual cicadas are too dumb to have developed such a smart tactic, so it is evolution who is the mathematician here. But unlike we humans, who can manipulate numbers abstractly, without mortal danger, evolution must always add, subtract, multiply, and divide, solely with lives. Cicadas en masse are a type of bio-numeracy, and each brood is collectively a Sieve of Eratosthenes, sacrificing trillions to arrive at an agreed-upon prime number. In this, the cicada may be, as far as we know, the most horrific way to do math in the entire universe.

Being an embodied temporal calculation, the cicada invasion has forced upon us a new awareness of time itself. I have found your mother crying from this. She says every day now she thinks about the inherent question they pose: What will our lives be like, when the cicadas return?

Against our will the Bourbon Brood has scheduled something in our calendar, 17 years out, shifting the future from abstract to concrete. When the cicadas return, you will be turning 21. Your sister, 19. Myself, already 55. Your mother, 54. Your grandparents will, very possibly, all be dead. This phase of life will have finished. And to mark its end, the cicadas will crawl up through the dirt, triumphant in their true ownership, and the empty nest of our home will buzz again with these long-living, subterranean-dwelling, prime-calculating, calendar-setting, goddamn vampires.

Stubbornness

God, you’re stubborn. You are so stubborn. Stubborn about which water bottle to drink from, stubborn about doing all the fairground rides twice, stubborn about going up slides before going down them, pushing buttons on elevators, being the first to go upstairs, deciding what snack to eat, wearing long-sleeved shirts in summer, wanting to hold hands, wanting not to hold hands; in general, you’re stubborn about all events, and especially about what order they should happen in. You’re stubborn about doing things beyond your ability, only to get angry when you inevitably fail. You’re stubborn in wanting the laws of physics to work the way you personally think they should. You’re stubborn in how much you love, in how determined and fierce your attachment can be.

This is true of many young children, of course, but you seem an archetypal expression of it. Even your losing battles are rarely true losses. You propose some compromise where you can snatch, from the jaws of defeat, a sliver of a draw. Arguments with you are like trading rhetorical pieces in a chess match. While you can eventually accept wearing rain boots because it’s pouring out, that acceptance hinges on putting them on in the most inconvenient spot imaginable.

So when I get frustrated—and yes, I do get frustrated—I remind myself that “stubborn” is a synonym for “willful.” Whatever human will is, you possess it in spades. You want the world to be a certain way, and you’ll do everything in your power to make it so. Luckily, most of your designs are a kind of benevolent dictatorship. And at root, I believe your willfulness comes from loving the world so much, and wanting to, like all creatures vital with life force, act in it, and so bend it to your purposes.

What I don’t think is that this willfulness is because we, as parents, are so especially lenient. Because we’re not. No, your stubbornness has felt baked in from the beginning.

This might be impossible to explain to you now, in all its details, but in the future you’ll be ready to understand that I really do mean “the beginning.” As in the literal moment of conception. Or the moment before the moment, when you were still split into halves: egg and sperm. There is much prudery around the topic, as you’ll learn, and because of its secrecy people conceptualize the entire process as fundamentally simple, like this: Egg exists (fanning itself coquettishly). Sperm swims hard (muscular and sweaty). Sperm reaches egg. Penetrates and is enveloped. The end. But this is a radical simplification of the true biology, which, like all biology, is actually about selection.

Selection is omnipresent, occurring across scales and systems. For example, the elegance of your DNA is because so many variants of individuals were generated, and of these, only some small number proved fit in the environment (your ancestors). The rest were winnowed away by natural selection. So too, at another scale, your body’s immune system internally works via what’s called “clonal selection.” Many different immune cells with all sorts of configurations are generated at low numbers, waiting as a pool of variability in your bloodstream. In the presence of an invading pathogen, the few immune cells that match (bind to) the pathogen are selected to be cloned in vast numbers, creating an army. And, at another scale and in a different way, human conception works via selection too. Even though scientists understand less about how conception selection works (these remain mysterious and primal things), the evidence indicates the process is full of it.

First, from the perspective of the sperm, they are entered into a win-or-die race inside an acidic maze with three hundred million competitors. If the pH or mucus blockades don’t get them, the fallopian tubes are a labyrinth of currents stirred by cilia. It’s a mortal race in all ways, for the woman’s body has its own protectors: white blood cells, which register the sperm as foreign and other. Non-self. So they patrol and destroy them. Imagining this, I oscillate between the silly and the serious. I picture the white blood cells patrolling like stormtroopers, and meanwhile the sperm (wearing massive helmets) attempt to rush past them. But in reality, what is this like? Did that early half of you see, ahead, some pair of competing brothers getting horrifically eaten, and smartly went the other way? What does a sperm see, exactly? We know they can sense the environment, for of the hundreds of sperm who make it close enough to potentially fertilize the egg, all must enter into a kind of dance with it, responding to the egg’s guidance cues in the form of temperature and chemical gradients (the technical jargon is “sperm chemotaxis”). We know from experiments that eggs single out sperm non-randomly, attracting the ones they like most. But for what reasons, or based on what standards, we don’t know. Regardless of why, the egg zealously protects its choice. Once a particular sperm is allowed to penetrate its outer layer, the egg transforms into a literal battle station, blasting out zinc ions at any approaching runners-up to avoid double inseminations.

Then, on the other side, there’s selection too. For which egg? Women are born with about a million of what are called “follicles.” These follicles all grow candidate eggs, called “oocytes,” but, past puberty, only a single oocyte each month is chosen to be released by the winner and become the waiting egg. In this, the ovary itself is basically a combination of biobank and proving grounds. So the bank depletes over time. Menopause is, basically, when the supply has run out. But where do they all go? Most follicles die in an initial background winnowing, a first round of selection, wherein those not developing properly are destroyed. The majority perish there. Only the strongest and most functional go on to the next stage. Each month, around 20 of these follicles enter a tournament with their sisters to see which of them ovulates, and so releases the winning egg. This competition is enigmatic, and can only be described as a kind of hormonal growth war. The winner must mature faster, but also emit chemicals to suppress the others, starving them. The losers atrophy and die. No wonder it’s hard for siblings to always get along.

Things like this explain why, the older I get, the more I am attracted to one of the first philosophies, by Empedocles. All things are either Love or Strife. Or both.

From that ancient perspective, I can’t help but feel your stubbornness is why you’re here at all. That it’s an imprint left over, etched onto your cells. I suspect you won all those mortal races and competitions, succeeded through all that strife, simply because from the beginning, in some proto-way, you wanted to be here. Out of all that potentiality, willfulness made you a reality.

Can someone be so stubborn they create themselves?

by Erik Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective |  Read more:

Image: Alexander Naughton

[ed. Lovely. I can see my grandaughter might already have my stubborn gene. Hope it does her more good!]

Image: Alexander Naughton
Image: Alexander Naughton

The Intrinsic Perspective

The Intrinsic Perspective