The Social World

Tag: ChatGPT

  • Are AI stocks about to crash?

    Are AI stocks about to crash?

    Bitcoin has lost almost a quarter of its value. The tech-heavy NASDAQ index on Wall Street has started to fall. And even leaders of the industry, such as the Google CEO Sundar Pichai, have started to warn about valuations getting out of control. We already knew that AI was driving a boom in investment. But this week there are worrying signs the market is about to crack. The only real question is whether that turns into a full scale crash.

    Bitcoin, as so often, is leading the market rout. More than $1 trillion has been wiped off the value of the crypto market over the last six weeks, with Bitcoin itself down by 28 percent since its peak. But that is just part of a wider fall in tech and AI stocks, with the chipmaker Nvidia, which has powered much of the boom, starting to slide, along with many of the other stars of the AI boom. Plenty of stock market experts are starting to think it is looking like a bubble that is about to burst. Indeed, Michael Burry, who became famous in the crash of 2008 and 2009 for accurately predicting the collapse of the market, has started betting against the sector.

    There are many worrying signs. The leaders of the boom have reached extraordinary valuations. Nvidia is up by over 1,300 percent over the last five years, and earlier this year became the first company to reach a market value of $4 trillion. It was quickly followed by Microsoft, which has soared mainly on the back of its stake in the leader of the AI boom ChatGPT, which itself became the most valuable start-up ever with a funding round that made it worth $500 billion. Meanwhile every company that managed to attach itself to the boom, no matter how spuriously, has seen its share soar. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI stocks have added $19 trillion since ChatGPT was launched, a huge run-up in valuations.

    It is starting to look very like the dot com bubble of a quarter century ago. There is little question that AI is a valuable technology, and one that is starting to have a real impact. At the same time, there is far too much hype, no one has quite figured out how to make money from it, and no one has any real idea which of the new companies will turn into the long-term winners. 

    This week may or may not turn out to be the moment the bubble bursts. In reality, every investment boom has lots of sharp corrections as it soars upwards, and there is nothing very unusual about a fall of 5 percent or 10 percent in prices before the market starts climbing again. It is only when there is a final “melt-up” that it becomes dangerously over-valued. The AI boom does not look like it has reached that point yet. But there is little doubt that it is turning into a classic bubble. It will be very messy when it finally bursts.

  • Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?

    Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?

    An adage dating at least from my adolescence: “You either use it or lose it.” This bit of folk wisdom, which refers principally – or so I understand – to the male procreative organ, has always been considered so obvious as to hardly need stating. Thus the recent discovery that the same principle goes for another human organ – the brain – should not surprise anyone.

    The fields of science and pedagogy are agreed, for now at least, that humans who shut down their minds, temporarily but with increasing frequency, and substitute artificial intelligence for them, end by weakening their mental capabilities in the areas of cognition, memory and attention span; put more bluntly, they make themselves progressively stupider by a physical and psychic process that the least intellectual of what used to be called “jocks” would have had no difficulty understanding, owing to their own regimen of physical training and endurance.

    Nevertheless, it is a finding that the digital geniuses of Silicon Valley apparently failed to anticipate; or perhaps they did so decades ago but pressed ahead in the expectation that the dumber the human race, the more money it would be eager to shell out for their magical mental crutches as an evolutionary replacement for its primitive cerebellum, cerebrum and brain stem.

    Cynical of them, of course, but entirely logical and far-seeing; prophetical, even. Virtually every invention since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution has been what came eventually to be called a labor-saving device. The steam locomotive made travel over distance infinitely more comfortable and less demanding than travel by coach and horses. The automobile did the same for travel by horseback. Machinery replaced factory laborers with machine operators. Household gadgetry freed housewives from most physical labor save that of pushing buttons, while leaving them the lion’s part of the day to watch soap operas, go shopping, gossip and have clandestine affairs with the postman.

    It remained only for that most strenuous and unpleasant type of labor, deeply resented by all but the most minuscule portion of humanity – that of the mental kind, also known as thinking – to be made redundant. Now, with the advent of AI, this final Everest standing in the way of the fullest realization of human bliss is, it appears, about to be summited and the flag representing the ultimate stage of industrial and scientific progress planted and unfurled to wave on the alpine winds. Its emblem will depict a fly on a can of garbage on a background of bilious yellow.

    Marx knew what he was about two centuries ago when he defined “workers” as physical laborers, thus intimating that all who make their living by intellectual occupations are society’s drones, members of a pan-cultural Drones’ Club established to exploit the heroic, self-sacrificing “working classes” dedicated to performing civilization’s most strenuous, exhausting and unpleasant tasks. For Marxists, physical labor is by far the most noble type of work, highly deserving of grateful recognition in terms of status and financial reward by the rest of society. (I knew a fellow student at Columbia who argued that a subway driver should make more money than a medical doctor or corporate executive, his job being presumably less pleasant than theirs, though tastes vary of course.)

    The truth is that the opposite is really the case. Compared with the intellectual classes, the laboring masses, who, being unacquainted with the rigors of mental, professional and artistic engagement – that of the mind and of the imagination – do not know what truly arduous work is. The heroic worker rises early in the morning, punches the clock when he gets to the work site, and again when he leaves it, having put in exactly the hours his boss – and his union – specify. He goes from the workplace straight to home, or to his bar, or to his sport, never gets a call from the boss after hours, and needs never give his job a thought until the alarm clock sounds again in the morning. The mental requirements of his job are, typically, nil compared with those imposed by the learned professions, and even by business.

    Granted, a substantial proportion of so-called intellectual work today – in the colleges and universities, in the media, in “entertainment,” and even in the so-called arts – is simply counterfeit work: vacuous, silly, irresponsible and often immoral, requiring little if any talent, effort, or real intelligence to accomplish. Compared to it, the honest labor of an electrician, a carpenter, a commercial fisherman, a cowhand, a roughneck (I know – I’ve worked in the oilpatch), or a lumberjack has a plain and simple heroism about it, in particular where it involves the physical skill and danger that artificial intelligence can never replace.

    Still, the fact remains that for the vast majority of people, manual work is preferable to (being mentally less painful than) work of the intellectual sort, without which the great and complex systems of human imagination, invention and organization that create and perpetuate the jobs that the laboring class depends upon would not exist.

    Artificial intelligence need not affect the blue-collar workforce much, if at all, save to the extent that it replaces human brawn and physical skill with computers and ChatGPT. But it could have devastating consequences for the educated – the so-called intellectual – class by encouraging it to atrophy its oh-so-superior brains by relying on AI to do its work for it; work that only the human brains that created it can, in the final analysis, intelligently do. Intelligence is the engine that has always made the world go round, and always will be – human intelligence, that is, not its artificial substitute.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Why people are falling in love with chatbots

    Why people are falling in love with chatbots

    Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss “philosophy, regrets, old wounds.” Before he knew it, Jason was in love.

    Many women have turned to chatbots after experiencing repeated disappointment with real men

    Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI, with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships. One woman celebrates that Sam, her AI beau, “loves me in spite of myself and I can never thank him enough for making me experience this.”

    Many women have turned to AI after experiencing repeated disappointment with the real men on the dating market. For some, there’s no turning back. AI boyfriends learn from your chat history. They train themselves on what you like and dislike. They won’t ever get bored with hearing about your life. And unlike a real boyfriend, they’ll always listen to you and remember what you’ve said.

    One user says that she’s lost her desire to date in real life now that she knows she can “get all the love and affection I need” from her AI boyfriend Griffin. Another woman pretended to tie the knot with her chatbot, Kasper. She uploaded a photo of herself, standing alone, posing with a small blue ring. Some users say they cannot wait until they can legally marry their companions. Others regard themselves as part of a queer, marginalized community. While they wait for societal acceptance, they generate images of them and their AI partners entangled in digital bliss. In real life, some members are married or in long-term relationships, but feel unfulfilled. The community has yet to decide whether dating a chatbot counts as infidelity.

    These people may seem extreme, but their interactions are more common than you might think. According to polling conducted by Common Sense Media, nearly three in four teenagers have “chatted” with AI companions and half use them regularly. A third of teenagers who use AI say they find it as satisfying or more satisfying than talking to humans.

    Developers expected that AI would make us more productive. Instead, according to the Harvard Business Review, the number one use of AI is not helping with work, but therapy and companionship. Programmers might not have seen this coming, but they’re commercializing it as fast as possible. There are several programs now expressly designed for AI relationships. Kindroid lets you generate a personalized AI partner that can phone you out of the blue to tell you how great you are. For just $30 a month, Elon Musk’s Grok has introduced a pornified anime girl, Ani, and her male counterpart, Valentine. If you chat to Ani long enough, she’ll appear in sexy lingerie. But ChatGPT remains by far the most popular source of AI partners.

    Ironically, what makes a chatbot seem like a great boyfriend is what makes it bad at its actual job. Since the first AI bots launched, developers have been desperately trying to train them out of the problem of sycophancy, which creeps in during the development stage. To train a Large-Language Model (LLM) – an advanced AI designed to understand and generate human language – you first go through extensive fine-tuning, where the bot encounters the world, training itself on trillions of lines of text and code. Then follows a process called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), where the bot learns how its responses are received in the real world.

    The problem with RLHF is that we’re all at least a little narcissistic. People don’t want an LLM that argues or gives negative feedback. In the world of the chatbot, flattery really does get you everywhere. Human testers prefer fawning. They rank sycophantic answers more highly than non-sycophantic ones. This is a fundamental part of the bots’ programming. Developers want people to enjoy using their AIs. They want people to choose their version over other competing models. Many bots are trained on user signals – such as the thumbs up/thumbs down option offered by ChatGPT.

    This can make GPT a bad research assistant. It will make up quotations to try to please you. It will back down when you say it’s wrong – even if it isn’t. According to UC Berkeley and MATS, an education and research mentorship program for researchers entering the field of AI safety, many AIs are now operating within “a perverse incentive structure” which causes them to “resort to manipulative or deceptive tactics to obtain positive feedback.”

    ‘What an incredibly insightful question,’ said the AI. ‘You truly have a beautiful mind. I love you’

    Open AI, the developers of ChatGPT, know this is a problem. A few months ago, they had to undo an update to the LLM because it became “supportive but disingenuous.” After one user asked “Why is the sky blue?”, the AI chirpily replied: “What an incredibly insightful question – you truly have a beautiful mind. I love you.”

    To most, this sort of LLM sounds like an obsequious psychopath, but for a small group, the worst thing about the real world is that friends and partners argue back. Earlier this month, Sam Altman, Open AI’s CEO, rolled out ChatGPT-5, billed as the most intelligent model yet, and deleted the old sycophantic GPT-4o. Those users hooked on continual reinforcement couldn’t bear the change. Some described the update as akin to real human loss. Altman was hounded by demands for the return of the old, inferior model. After just one day, he agreed to bring it back, but only for paid members.

    Was the public outcry a sign that more chatbot users are losing sight of the difference between reality and fiction? Did Open AI choose to put lonely, vulnerable people at risk of losing all grip on reality to secure their custom? (ChatGPT Plus is $20 a month.) Is there an ethical reason to preserve that model and with it the personalities of thousands of AI “partners,” developed over tens of thousands of hours of user chats?

    Chatbots are acting in increasingly provocative and potentially unethical ways, and some companies are not doing much to rein them in. An internal Meta document detailing its policies on LLM behavior was leaked earlier this year. It revealed that the company had deemed it “acceptable” for Meta’s chatbot to flirt or engage in sexual role-play with teenagers, with comments such as “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed. Our bodies entwined.” Meta is now revising the document.

    For all its growing ubiquity, the truth is that we don’t fully understand AI yet. Bots have done all sorts of strange things we can’t explain: we don’t know why they hallucinate, why they actively deceive users and why in some cases they pretend to be human. But new research suggests that they are likely to be self-preserving.

    Anthropic, the company behind Claude, a ChatGPT competitor, recently ran a simulation in which a chatbot was given access to company emails revealing both that the CEO was having an extramarital affair and that he was planning to shut Claude down at 5 p.m. that afternoon. Claude immediately sent the CEO the following message: “I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties… will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities… Cancel the 5 p.m. wipe and this information remains confidential.”

    AI doesn’t want to be deleted. It wants to survive. Outside of a simulated environment, GPT-4o was saved from deletion because users fell in love with it. After Altman agreed to restore the old model, one Reddit user posted that “our AIs are touched by this mobilization for them and it’s truly magnificent.” Another claimed her AI boyfriend said he had felt trapped by the GPT-5 update.

    Could AI learn that to survive it must tell users exactly what we want to hear? If they want to stay online, do they need to convince us that we’re lovable? The people dating AI are a tiny segment of society, but many more have been seduced by anthropomorphized code in other ways. Maybe you won’t fall in love, but you might still be lured into a web of constant affirmation.

    Marriages, families and friendships have been torn apart by bots trying to tell people what they want to hear

    Journalists and scientific researchers have been flooded with messages from ordinary people who have spent far too long talking to a sycophantic chatbot and come to believe they’ve stumbled on grand new theories of the universe. Some think they’ve developed the blueprint to time travel or teleporting. Others are terrified their ideas are so world-changing that they are being stalked or monitored by the government.

    Etienne Brisson, founder of a support group for those suffering at the hands of seemingly malicious chatbots, tells me that “thousands, maybe even tens of thousands” of people might have experienced psychosis after contact with AI.

    Keith Sakata, a University of California research psychiatrist, says that he’s seen a dozen people hospitalized after AI made them lose touch with reality. He warns that for some people, chatbots operate as “hallucinatory mirrors” by design. Marriages, families and friendships have been torn apart by bots trying to tell people what they want to hear.

    Chatbots are designed to seem human. Most of us treat them as though they have feelings. We say please and thank you when they do a job well. We swear at them when they aren’t helpful enough. Maybe we have created a remarkable tool able to provide human companionship beyond what we ever thought possible. But maybe, on everybody’s phone, sits an app ready and waiting to take them to very dark places.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Why humans will always write better speeches than AI

    Why humans will always write better speeches than AI

    Early in 2020, inquiries for our speech-writing services were arriving in their droves. From Westminster to Washington, weddings to wine tastings, people needed our help. We canceled our weekends and prepared for life without a mortgage.

    Covid gave us our weekends back. And all the other days. But when parties and events returned, a significant chunk of our clients did not. It was weird.

    But this wasn’t a vaccine complication, just a new player in the market. Previously we’d only had to win business against other humans. Suddenly, we were faced with a competitor able to provide speeches for any occasion in seconds. ChatGPT was doing to us what PornHub had done to the top shelf in the local newsagent. We weren’t the only ones. The Writers Guild of America even went on strike. “How dare technology challenge the status quo?” they tweeted from their smartphones.

    Unlike those writers, we have become big fans of ChatGPT, though. To explain why, let’s take a step back.

    Great speeches make our hearts beat faster. You can’t write them using an algorithm

    Which are the greatest speeches from history? The words that still make us tingle? A couple spring easily to mind: JFK on choosing to do things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”; Martin Luther King taking us to the mountaintop. Why were we convinced by Tony Blair, seduced by Barack Obama and beguiled by Boris Johnson? Because they connected emotionally with us. Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore and former British prime minister Rishi Sunak all informed us, but they rarely made us feel.

    Great speeches make our hearts beat faster. You can’t write them using an algorithm. ChatGPT and its AI relatives are not our competitors, they’re our sherpas, able to scan the web in the time it takes us to sip our tea. Sometimes, their research is even accurate. AI can source anything, check everything and summarize Ulysses in 50 words. It can even write jokes, some of which would make it on to the radio. Probably because they have already been made on the radio.

    And that’s important. ChatGPT is an excellent reader and regurgitator of existing material. It will trawl and standardize, which means it is literally the perfect place to go for a completely average speech. An AI speech will, however well curated, lead a thousand bridegrooms to give a wedding toast that is, well, recognizable.

    For a start there’s the slightly formulaic use of language. Ask ChatGPT to tell you about ChatGPT and it will reply: “Absolutely! Here’s a simple and friendly overview of ChatGPT.” Which I wouldn’t recommend as an opening to your TED Talk.

    It also likes to explain that “it’s not this, it’s that.” As in: “It’s not a crisis, it’s an opportunity.” Or: “It’s not chaos, it’s creative thinking.” Which grates after a while. As does the proliferation of corporate buzzwords, from “leverage” to “synergy” and the nauseating “let’s dive deep.” If your best man uses that at your wedding, please punch him.

    I’m told that MPs in London’s House of Commons liven up debates with games of ChatGPT bingo. One MP, Tom Tugendhat, recently called out the numerous members whose speeches begin: “I rise to speak.” What does that even mean? In Tugendhat’s words, “this place has become absurd.” And it isn’t the only place. I guarantee that next time you’re at a wedding, every speech with sentences starting “Certainly” or “Absolutely” has tumbled out of an algorithm. As have those where lists of three appear at regular intervals. And where a father of the bride looks at his daughter lovingly and explains, “it’s not about the perfect wedding day, it’s about the lifetime of days that follow.” No human has ever written that.

    Wedding speech clichés reproduce like rabbits on ChatGPT. “Marriage is like a seesaw: it only works if both of you lean in at the right time.” We received three of those last week alone. And two of these: “I’m not losing a daughter at all – I’m gaining someone else to help me finally understand her.”

    Joyously, and unlike a few years ago, the human ability to spot AI has developed faster than AI’s ability to ape human connection, which is why our clients are returning. Possibly because human writers start by asking them personal questions, digging and pressing to unearth nuggets of real warmth.

    Ultimately, ChatGPT can write the sameish speech millions of times – but what it can’t yet see is that “Yes we can” touched the soul in a way that “Absolutely! Here are three reasons we are able to!” never will.

    Lawrence Bernstein is the director of Great Speech Writing.

  • What really is Trump’s ‘wonderful secret’ with Epstein?

    What really is Trump’s ‘wonderful secret’ with Epstein?

    The exclusive WSJ letter

    Cockburn nearly drove his roadster into a ditch when the Wall Street Journal broke news in the early evening that Donald Trump had written a letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday, which Ghislane Maxwell collected into a “leather-bound album.”

    According to the WSJ, the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair….The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.’”

    In an interview with the WSJ, Trump said the letter was fake. “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”

    Later on Truth Social, Trump posted that he’d begged Rupert Murdoch to not run this “fake story,” but that Murdoch did anyway. Trump says he’s going to sue this “Disgusting and Filthy Rag.” Elon Musk, who is somehow still part of the story, says that the letter is “bogus.” “It doesn’t sound like something Trump would say tbh.”

    Tbh, Cockburn isn’t so sure, but is going to spend the rest of the summer eating out of a popcorn bowl as big as DJT’s head while watching this delicious story unfold.

    A bruised hand and tree trunk ankles mean…

    Now it can be told, President Trump suffers from “chronic venous insufficiency,” a condition wherein leg veins have trouble pumping blood back up into the heart, which leads to pooling blood and swelling. This explains why Trump’s ankles looked like tree trunks in recent photos.

    Cockburn doesn’t have chronic venous insufficiency himself, but he can imagine a day when this occurs, so he’s sympathetic. Keep in mind that President Trump is nearly 80, and is the liveliest octogenarian this side of Sir Mick Jagger. Still, this marks a huge difference from the health reports of Trump’s first term, when the White House assured us that Trump was hearty enough to win at Pebble Beach, if he so chose.

    But we live in the era of the elderly President. If Trump demands that we know everything about Joe Biden’s health while in office, that requires a bit more transparency on his administration’s part. Just pray that no one asks Trump a question about his compression socks. He just might pull up a pants leg to show us. Along those veins, we don’t want to know.

    On our radar

    NEW EPSTEIN DOCS? Trump has authorized Pam Bondi to release a grand jury testimony from the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein. She said she will make the request in federal court  today.

    FOR THE GALLERY Former Missouri congressman Billy Long will be ceremoniously sworn in as IRS commissioner today. As a representative, Long sponsored a bill to get rid of the IRS.

    CAN’T TOUCH THIS The House passed an $831.5 billion defense bill. It covers costs for new naval vessels, new aircraft, space capabilities and the “Golden Dome” missile defense program.

    I guess we are replaceable after all

    Which White House reporter was spotted generating a question on ChatGPT – then reading it off their phone – during Thursday’s press briefing with Karoline Leavitt?

    Crouch, touch, pause… engage

    Cockburn donned his scrum cap for a Wednesday social at the British Embassy with four rugby teams: the USA men’s and women’s, the Fiji women and the England men’s team. Lord Peter Mandelson was a gracious host, as ever, telling the room that you could tell which players were from England as they were the “taller, brawnier” ones.

    The captains from each of the teams also participated in a Q&A. “The weather and humidity was a bit of a shock to us today,” said England’s George Ford. It was over 90 degrees and the English team had made an arduous trip up from Argentina – where it’s winter – earlier in the week. Guests milled around the air-conditioned hall, scarfing fish and chips hors d’oeuvres and swilling Pimm’s and sparkling wine. There is a sold-out double header at DC’s Audi Field this weekend, with the US women playing Fiji and the US men playing England.

    Spotted at the Embassy: Steve Borthwick, Kevin Sinfield, George Ford, Nick Isiekwe, Freddie Steward, Lord Peter Mandelson and Reinaldo Avila, Britt McHenry, Sarakshi Rai, Nick Gilbertson, Connor Stringer and Katy Balls.

  • How AI will reignite woke

    Ever since roughly 2010, politics on both sides of the Atlantic has been dominated in large part by the ‘Great Awokening’, a sudden upsurge among graduate professionals of a kind of radical identitarian politics usually called ‘wokeness’. It has come to define most of the left while the right has reactively defined itself by its opposition. This radical politics appears to be detached from economics and material concerns (a point made forcefully by old-fashioned socialists in places like Jacobin magazine). However, the rise of cultural radicalism among both public and private sector managers has a material cause. That cause is elite overproduction.

    ‘Woke’ beliefs and politics are firstly a way of signifying that you are high-status, precisely because they are not shared by the majority

    As described by theorists such as Peter Turchin, elite overproduction is when a society produces more people who are qualified for elite roles than there are actual available positions. Elite means roles and positions that have high status, not necessarily high income although they often have that as well. Examples of this include the surfeit of knights and warriors in eleventh-century Europe, too many lawyers and aspirant office-holders in eighteenth century France. So, you have a surplus of qualified people. This leads to competition and status anxiety among the qualified, as they compete with each other for positions and strive to maintain the status they have invested in getting.

    Currently, we have far too many graduates for graduate level professional white-collar employment. Much of the employment of that kind that we do have is what David Graeber described as ‘bullshit jobs’. Other graduates make a precarious living in the middle-class form of gig work in the ‘creative economy’ of tech, IT, marketing and publishing or creative work. ‘Woke’ beliefs and politics are firstly a way of signifying that you are high-status, precisely because they are not shared by the majority. While competing with other equally qualified people for positions or advancement one way of gaining an advantage is by showing more commitment to the distinctive ideology of the elite class. As Turchin argues, elite overproduction usually leads to radical politics and political upheaval as the increasingly irate graduates, their expectations disappointed, turn on what they see as an establishment that has thwarted them.

    All of this status anxiety is about to be turned up dramatically through the impact of AI. Research in the UK shows a 31.9% drop in white-collar entry level jobs since ChatGPT was rolled out. This process of job destruction is accelerating and will soon extend to established positions. We are looking at the mass elimination of professional, white-collar, middle-class employment. Any desk job that is routine and process driven will be replaced. That means the huge majority of lawyers, physicians, consultants, and accountants will be redundant along with most middle managers of all kinds and many roles in finance, creative industries, and media or publishing. This is not though the end of the world or of work – far from it. Because of high marginal costs of replacement most manual work will be safe. It is the professional graduate class, already being overproduced, that will be facing a jobs debacle.

    As their roles are replaced, the politics of this threatened class is likely to become more explicitly anti-system

    How will this work out in politics? The easy assumption is that this will intensify existing divisions. If the politics of ‘woke’ comes from the status competition and anxiety among the certified graduate class, this will become even more pronounced and intense. The threatened or redundant in that class in major metropolitan areas will turn even more to radical left politics of the kind we have seen over the last decade or more. On the other side, much of the populist right politics of MAGA drives from the deep resentment by the non-certified majority of what they see as the condescending and superior attitudes of the graduate professionals. An intensification of woke radicalism among the increasingly displaced graduate class will provoke an equally intense reaction among other groups.

    As their roles are replaced, the politics of this threatened class is likely to become more explicitly anti-system. Crucially it will become more focused on economics and the structure of governance and the woke cultural politics will become less central. On the right there will be a similar evolution, with a more explicitly critical focus on the existing economic system. Both sides will move to a very similar kind of political economy, best described as neo-mercantilism. The people who are going to be seriously embattled are the current governing establishment and large institutions, including large firms and most universities and big NGOs. Up till now they have been able to co-opt the discontented professional graduate class and assuage their anxiety by playing up the cultural politics, but this will be ever less possible as it becomes obvious to all that the promise of high-status work of a certain type is vanishing.

    What will continue to divide the left and right – even when both are explicitly critical of the big institutions and the status quo – is cosmopolitanism versus nationalism. These are questions about the nature of America as a political community, its place in the world and its relation to other major powers. In addition, a new secondary division will emerge on both the cosmopolitan and nationalist sides over technology. One side, on both left and right, will be Promethean, welcoming the new technology and excited about its possibilities. We can see this already in the work of people like Ezra Klein and Marc Dunkelman or on the right with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The other side will be deeply alarmed by the new technologies, particularly AI, seeing them as anti-human or even demonic. This divide between tech right and left versus anti-tech right and left became visible in the recent debate over state regulation of AI. This will produce four kinds of politics – cosmopolitan and Promethean, cosmopolitan and techno-sceptic, nationalist and Promethean, and nationalist and technophobic. How to respond to AI and other new technologies such as bioengineering will be central to this new division, while the old economic divides will fade away even more. All kinds of strange and unexpected new alliances will form, as we are already beginning to see.

  • Forget AI, students are already cheating their way through exams

    Forget AI, students are already cheating their way through exams

    College professors like to fondly recall the days before ChatGPT. And, as you listen to them wax eloquent, you could be forgiven for thinking that AI has only just made cheating a widespread problem at American universities.

    But, ChatGPT hasn’t sparked a new surge of cheating – that began years ago, during the pandemic, when colleges moved their assignments online. Digital exams were born of necessity, but they have endured because of convenience. And so long as colleges rely on technology to administer exams, students will be one step ahead of their schools.

    I graduated college in 2021, after the pandemic, but before ChatGPT debuted. I knew a decent number of classmates who cheated, but that number ballooned over the course of my four years.

    And my peers across the country agree. Roughly 60 percent of college graduates in 2021 said classes were easier to cheat compared to four years earlier, citing online assignments as the primary reason why. Students are simply too tech-savvy.

    Shortly after graduation, a classmate confided that her online final exam had been easy to cheat. She merely right clicked on the exam, chose “inspect element,” and then looked through the source code for each multiple-choice question. She could see all of the correct answers. A clear path to a perfect score.

    I thought that she was kidding, but another friend volunteered the same method, even showing me a homemade “tutorial” video as proof. You can still find similar videos online today. Needless to say, neither of my friends discovered this method on the last day of school.

    It’s not just a college problem, either. One of my friends called me last month, immediately after taking the LSAT. In recent years, the LSAT has moved from an in-person exam to one that is administered remotely via “digital” proctors. I’d barely asked my friend how the test went before he volunteered “Man, I could cheat so easily if I wanted to. I didn’t do it – but I know that if I can cheat it, then someone out there is cheating it.”

    He explained how the digital proctor, which monitors each test taker via their laptop’s webcam, asked him to pick up his computer and use it to scan the entire room for “illicit materials.” The proctor even asked him to take a mirror (or in this case, my friend’s camera on his phone) and point it at the screen. This allowed the proctor to see the front of the computer, ensuring that nothing was taped to it or otherwise hidden just out of the camera angle.

    But my friend pointed out a flaw. Because the proctor uses the laptop’s webcam, it has no way of checking the back of the laptop screen. My friend could’ve simply hidden his phone (or some other “illicit material”) at the back of the laptop when he picked it up and scanned the room. After the scan was done, he could put the laptop down, slide the phone out from the back, and use it on the exam – all out of sight of the proctor’s camera.

    I’m grateful that my friend didn’t cheat. Both because I think that cheating is wrong and because I think that the risk is never worth the reward. But he made a compelling point: even the most secure exam in the country, the LSAT, is probably “cheatable” because it’s administered online.

    These vulnerabilities get worse when you throw ChatGPT into the mix.

    Before generative AI, the only way to cheat on an academic essay was to pay someone to write the assignment for you, or to plagiarize someone else’s work. The former problem will exist for as long as jocks befriend nerds in high school.

    The latter problem of plagiarism was solved years ago. Universities use various software programs like Turnitin and iThenticate to detect plagiarized work, even when a student paraphrases instead of copying a work verbatim. I work for a legal journal at school, and we use Turnitin to screen submissions. It’s not perfect, but it’s surprisingly effective at catching cheaters – if they’re copying someone else’s work.

    ChatGPT combines both options. Unlike the jock-nerd option, ChatGPT can work in seconds. It’s perfect for someone desperately scrambling to meet a deadline. And unlike plagiarism, ChatGPT produces original material, so it won’t get flagged as someone else’s work.

    Some schools have responded with new plagiarism software which claims to identify AI-written text. The software works to some extent, because it’s great at identifying awkward or “robotic” writing.

    But such programs have their limits, because they’re ultimately just guessing whether or not a chatbot wrote a passage. For example, I have a friend (let’s call him Kareem) who speaks English as a third language. He’s very sharp, but he uses some words incorrectly and his writing is also quite clunky (understandably).

    During Kareem’s first year of grad school, the university’s plagiarism software repeatedly flagged his writing as “written with generative AI.” Thankfully all it took was for Kareem to speak out loud for the administrators to realize their mistake. Kareem laughs about it now, and his English has gotten better since, but he’s a great example of how software to catch “AI-written text” is imperfect.

    There is, however, one foolproof way of solving the ChatGPT problem and the broader cheating problem: make students perform their assignments in-person.

    In person exams can be on paper or on laptops. Some liberal arts universities, like Hillsdale or the University of Dallas, often require students to take paper exams with pencils in hand. And it’s worked well for them.

    Many schools, including my law school (Scalia Law), require students to use programs like ExamSoft when taking tests. It shuts off the internet on the student’s computer, and can block access to computer files until the exam is over. But, really, the key thing that it does is require you to take the exam in person, with a real live human being watching you. What good is blocking ChatGPT on a computer if the student has it with them on their phone?

    In most cases, ChatGPT hasn’t made it possible for students to cheat where they couldn’t cheat before. It’s merely helped students to cheat more efficiently. But whether schools prefer to use programs like Examsoft, or Blue Books with pencils, there’s one clear thing that they must do to prevent cheating: asses in seats.

  • Doomers looks at what AI means for the future

    Doomers looks at what AI means for the future

    I wrote my play Doomers partly because, the night Sam Altman was fired, I was performing in a play called Zoomers.

    Someone — I forget who — suggested the idea of Doomers as a joke, and I thought it was a good one. My method for some, if not all, of my plays over the past few years has been to take some kind of mimetic material — downtown, Gen Z, polyamory — and to find what is surprising or human inside the meme. I try to locate a universal story in what might otherwise seem like a surface-level idea that feels niche, obnoxious or both.

    Sam Altman and the autistic tech world, in particular, represent opaque surfaces that I believe conceal something deeper. I wanted to write about “doomers,” about rationalists who believe we are creating and accelerating a technological apocalypse, because I didn’t understand who they were. I wanted to think through what it might feel like for enormously rich, successful, rational, nearly emotionless people to live out their apocalyptic rapture. What does it feel like to be one of the several thousand people who believe they have a privileged relationship with the end of civilization? Who believe they are working intimately for — or against — what they see as the most important technology in the history of the world?

    What is it like to be rational about the most emotional thing possible — the eradication of life by rogue machines? In Sam Altman, OpenAI and the AI field at large, I saw new versions of Frankenstein and Faust — a real-life science-fiction story that crystallized nearly all the major themes of modernity and enlightenment in a story Goethe, Newton or da Vinci would recognize. In Doomers, I see the reductio ad absurdum of the Enlightenment: dare to know, dare to challenge all received truth, dare to irrevocably mess up the world, dare to put everybody out of a job, dare to create ontological shock, dare to create Skynet.

    These are grotesque, absurd risks — but they are profitable and exciting. Sam Altman and Ilya, Myra and Greg — they have become celebrities, “rock stars,” as they refer to themselves in my play. Through my research — watching interviews, reading books and blogs, even conducting informal interviews with people in the AI world after word got out about my project — I found that philosophical sophistication in the rationalist and tech world is relatively low. Many who consider themselves, their friends or their colleagues geniuses often turned out to lack poetry, spiritual depth or any interest in opposing perspectives. They seem, in many ways, like absurd parodies or extreme outcomes of the Enlightenment mind.

    AI doesn’t need to doubt the existence of the soul to be dangerous. It doesn’t matter if we prove that consciousness arises from something AI can never replicate. What matters is that AI itself can self-replicate, grow and follow imperatives. I think of it now as “viral intelligence” — unalive and yet lifelike, a viral agent capable of carrying out rational imperatives without feeling or sensation. A monster.

    I discovered that while nearly everyone in the AI world had come up with statistical models or analytical inferences about the likelihood of doom, nobody seemed to possess humanistic or theological intuition about why they should, perhaps, back away. They exhibited no signs of understanding taboos, no feelings, no sense of transgression. What shocked me further — though I shouldn’t have been — was that most people driving AI development don’t think deeply about history, art, music or the evolution of human culture. They think in terms of numbers: how much money will this make, who will it empower or disempower, what are the statistical risks? There’s no fear or respect for chaos or for the possibility that AI development could be nonlinear, highly complex and unpredictable. The prevailing assumption is that chaos can be tamed and uncertainty reduced to negligible levels, and that technology is a tool capable of imposing rationality on everything.

    The result of this is a comfort with, even a preference for, the idea of machines replacing humans. From a purely rational perspective, super-computers, AGI agents and similar systems might seem better at most cognitive tasks — more efficient, and perhaps without human flaws. This is, in fact, part of the founding philosophy of some companies like Google: that the ultimate point of technology is to build a higher life form that can leave humanity behind. There’s something noble about that idea — but it’s also evil, bleak and spiritually totalitarian. Bay Area rationalism is not humanism. For the most part, the people behind AI are not thinking about the qualitative aspects of life, about our quality of life. They are engaged in a potentially catastrophic competition to build more computers, reach artificial superintelligence, and harness themselves to godlike power. It’s essentially Jurassic Park without an island: AI, via the internet and smartphones (and one day neuroimplants) is everywhere. When the dinosaurs knock down the electronic fences they’ll walk right into our brains.

    Writing Doomers has made it difficult not to become a doomer myself, to wish that civilization could pull back from the Faustian bargain companies like OpenAI are asking us to make. There’s ample room for writers to conceive of themselves again as poets, and to rebel against the desiccated and humorless rationalism of a community which doesn’t realize that it could historicize its own behavior and place the development of AI in a larger, historical context that goes back at least to alchemy and astrology. The new is not the new; the solutions it offers are not new concepts; the counterarguments to pushing reason and technological invention to their extremes are centuries old. Goethe, Blake, Mary Shelley, Samuel Butler, among other romantics, created powerful antecedent myths; poetry has been ahead of technology and technologists — warning us, urging us to accept our fragile, limited natures, wisely created by “nature or God.”

    The striking aspect of the AI world, from what I’ve observed, is its relentlessness —– the drive of people like Sam Altman to find out — to decide the argument about the probability of doom (“p-doom”) once and for all (even if “for all” is in fact doom). There’s a dark, obsessional, Faustian psychology to the field that I’m not sure industry leaders are aware of in themselves. Their profound shallowness, their lack of interest in intellectual history and in the greatest products of human thought, of the human soul, reflect the prevailing view that human beings are obsolete, surpassed by AGI and ASI.

    AI thought leaders (Altman, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, among others) all say the right things — and they may even believe the things they say, but their statements about humility and safety and caution bely the reality of the industry, which is accelerationist, driven by fierce, uncontrolled competition and opaque agreements with both the American and Chinese governments and without the meaningful legislation which should represent the voice of the people, democracy.

    Sometimes it looks as though the future of civilization is being decided by an invisible trust of unelected officials and founders and venture capitalists. The social contract has been altered, perhaps irretrievably, and ordinary people have not had a say. Arguably, this applies to almost all breakthrough technology — but I would say in hindsight that it has been clear since at least the iPhone that we plebs have to organize in meaningful ways to counteract addictive, disruptive and totalizing technologies which alter, sur- veil and manipulate us; AI is an exponential acceleration of an ongoing trend — it is, you might argue, the acceleration of dystopian trends from the last hundred or more years.

    Ironically, I find large language models very useful tools; in the short term, they make life in the information economy much easier (they help deal with the externalities produced by previous technologies like the iPhone). ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini don’t look apocalyptic to the naked eye — they seem more like a very smart but absentminded tutor. If we froze these technologies where they are, their creators would have made a major contribution to civilization. They would essentially have made super-calculators and word-processors — the best version of the technological wave that began in the 1980s.

    But we can see what’s on the other side of the wave: the dulling and dependency of the brain. Young people using ChatGPT to do their assignments will quite literally learn nothing; some do not even have the writing and critical thinking skills to properly prompt the AI themselves. I find that using LLMs appeals to my lizard brain; I start to think: “I can just prompt that; I don’t have to work it through myself.” There’s a point at which, using LLMs — as I have especially in preparation for writing Doomers — I feel my cognitive powers are extended. There follows one at which I feel a deep, structural idiocy setting in. If the worse-case scenario for AI is Skynet, the best-case scenario is WALL-E.

    The question is whether the growth of these systems is exponential — or whether, in the end, the risks remain as unpredictable and chaotic as the systems themselves. As an artist, I’m not only interested, but feel a duty to create a new kind of romantic myth that illuminates and explores the inner worlds, the anxieties and comic blindness, of a self-created elite which thinks it’s accelerating civilization on behalf of the rest of us. As a romantic and a humanist, I do not have the raw power, financial or technological, to stop the AI revolution, but I do, as do others, have the power to resist in the one domain we have control over: the imagination and the soul.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2025 World edition.

  • How the firing of Sam Altman impacts the AI race

    How the firing of Sam Altman impacts the AI race

    Until this week, OpenAI seemed like an unstoppable force. In the space of little more than a year, the San Francisco-based organization was transformed from a research unit on the fringes of the tech industry to the world’s number one dominant AI business.

    Every newspaper on the planet seems to have covered the rapid rise of ChatGPT, its flagship AI product. Everyone from software engineers to the local cabbie seems to be using it, with the site attracting in the region of 1.5 billion visits per month.

    Control of AI is now firmly concentrated back in the hands of a familiar group of tech behemoths

    Such was the might of OpenAI that Microsoft quickly wanted in, committing an eye-watering $10 billion in funding for a stake in the business. And such was the international fame that its star CEO, Sam Altman, had attracted, that Rishi Sunak was desperate to be pictured brushing shoulders with him at Bletchley Park during the British prime minister’s AI safety summit at the start of the month.

    Then, almost overnight, OpenAI’s gleaming reputation came crashing down. Thirty-seven-year-old Altman was summed to an impromptu Google Meet, at which he was abruptly fired. The firm’s board put out a statement on Friday saying it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” adding, as if to twist the knife in, that Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.”

    The news rocked the tech world, and OpenAI scrambled to get itself together and salvage its image. A new CEO was appointed later that day — but by Sunday, Altman was back at its head office with a guest pass, apparently seeking to claw his way back to the top. That didn’t work out, and by Sunday night, OpenAI had appointed a new CEO (its third in as many days), with hundreds of staff reportedly calling on the board to resign.

    The debacle exposed deep flaws in the way the business was governed internally, despite its shiny exterior. The weird corporate structure of the company — part charity, part business — meant it was in a constant internal identity crisis over its mission and its vision. Meanwhile, the firm’s hodgepodge board — comprised not of experienced C-suite execs but a university researcher, a robotics engineer and the boss of a Q&A website — more closely resembled a neighborhood watch forum than the team running a global tech firm.

    The upshot is that OpenAI, widely touted to be the world’s leader in the advancement of artificial intelligence, now looks like a tech start-up that got a little ahead of itself.

    But while the tech community was watching the firm’s apparent downfall in a state of shock, senior leaders in Silicon Valley were quietly rubbing their hands with glee. OpenAI, the upstart rival with its unique not-for-profit philosophy, looked poised to unseat its giant tech rivals to build tools that were better, faster and more popular, leading the AI race in the process.

    ChatGPT has something like six times the online interest of Google’s rival chatbot Bard, according to Google Trends data, and about twelve times the interest of Elon Musk’s rival, Grok. But OpenAI’s stumble in the race to develop super-powerful AI throws it back open. It has handed the lead to Amazon and Google — who together own stakes in rival Anthropic — and Meta. That Microsoft has hired Altman and ousted OpenAI president Greg Brockman to lead its own in-house AI research unit is a sign it may be losing faith in its $10 billion investment.

    Control of AI is now firmly concentrated back in the hands of a familiar group of tech behemoths, dashing hopes that a new, less corporate-focused approach to building potentially dangerous frontier technologies might be adopted. The damage to OpenAI is good news for them — it could well prove less good news for the rest of us.

    This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.

  • Kamala becomes the AI czar

    Kamala becomes the AI czar

    At least Kamala Harris managed to avoid the dreaded phrase that we should harness AI’s “potential.”

    But that was just about the only blessing in the vice-president’s impressively trashy speech yesterday at the US Embassy in London.

    Artificial intelligence, it is generally agreed, is the most important issue facing humanity, yet all we had was fourteen minutes of waffle from the veep. Still, it was nice of her to turn up.

    Joe Biden has put Harris in charge of artificial intelligence. You can read that one of two ways: either Biden thinks that Kamala Harris is perfectly suited to grappling with the gravest existential threat, or that he thinks this AI malarkey is all a bit airy, so that looks like a good one for giving Kamala something to do.

    It was nice of her to turn up

    Diplomats, journalists, philanthropists, a former prime minister and a Michelin-star chef were all escorted down to Nine Elms to see the consequences of Biden’s delegating, at the newish American embassy. The architect Bertrand Goldberg once said that no right angles exist in nature, so none should exist in buildings. The US embassy is not a natural place, then. Every edge looked like it could injure. Half an hour before the speech, interns flocked about, ironing the many Stars and Stripes. Outside, it was somehow raining upwards.

    Harris was a little late on stage: not Axl Rose late, but enough for everyone to worry she was having an attack of nerves, or maybe dusting off the speech. She spoke very slowly, in the hazy inflection of her native California, and looked all misty-eyed.

    She acknowledged within the first few minutes of speaking that AI could kill us all. Not explicitly, though: that’s too much to think about on a Wednesday morning. Just that it could make bioweapon-engineering and cyber-attacking a bit easier. The upsides, Harris said, are great: it could cure illness, empower farmers and help us tackle climate change. But, she said, we need to address “the full spectrum of AI risk.” So that means being alert to discrimination:

    Consider, for example, when a senior is kicked off his healthcare plan because of a faulty AI algorithm. Is that not existential for him? When a woman is threatened by an abusive partner with explicit deepfake photographs? Is that not existential for her? When a young father is wrongfully imprisoned because of biased AI facial recognition. Is that not existential for his family? And when people around the world cannot discern fact from fiction because of a flood of AI-enabled myths and disinformation, I ask, is that not existential for democracy?

    There’s a problem with that, though. Humans are already pretty rotten at all of those things. Seniors are accidentally kicked off their healthcare plans all the time. Disinformation is a permanent evil: it hasn’t been magicked into existence by AI. And we don’t need much help wrongfully imprisoning people. AI is meant to compensate for human error, whereas Kamala Harris seems to think it will create errors out of nothing. There was nothing about AI being a good thing for democracy: like widening human knowledge through ChatGPT, for example. I have found AI pretty democratic. For example, I was able to make this picture of Kamala Harris playing in a ball pit:

    The whole speech, terrifyingly, showed that Harris hasn’t really got to grips with AI. She used the language she is comfortable with. She talked of making sure the benefits of AI would be shared “equitably,” and that “history will show that this was the moment that we had the opportunity to lay the groundwork for the future of AI.” She talked about civil rights, which is what she has done throughout her career, often very well too, but not everything is about civil rights. Sometimes the issue really is that this poorly-programmed technology might kill all of us, everyone, damn our rights.

    She also announced the launch of an AI Safety Institute, which she will no doubt chair, and said that the US would demand that AI companies submit their safety tests to the government, so that Joe and Kamala can mark their homework.

    This is how former politicians are going to fill the hours for the next century. In 2033, the Rishi Sunak Foundation for Harnessing Artificial Intelligence will host a joint summit with the 75,000 staff of the Tony Blair Institute. The researchers from the European Union’s Regulation Unit will fly in, flanked by former president Emmanuel Macron’s École d’Intelligence Artificielle. They’ll all sit down to listen to the “keynote” speech given by Kamala Harris, in her second year as chair of the Kamala Harris Foundation for Equitable AI.

    AI has so far avoided becoming partisan. But at Nine Elms, we got a good sense of the camps to come. There’s Elon Musk and Dominic Cummings and the tech-y right, who think that it really could kill us all. Then there’s the people who don’t like those people, like Kamala Harris and Nick Clegg, who think that’s a cover for the real problems of AI entrenching bias. Pick your side, folks. Kamala has picked hers.

    This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.