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.