The Social World

Tag: Technology

  • Is the age of ‘de-extinction’ upon us?

    Colossal, a $10 billion biotech firm with a knack of grabbing headlines, has announced it is on the way to de-extinguishing the dodo, the very icon of extinction. Like most of Colossal’s announcements, this one included a hefty helping of hype. All the firm’s scientists have actually done on this occasion is prove they can grow primordial germ cells of pigeons, one of many necessary steps – and not the hardest one – in reviving the fat and flightless bird of the pigeon family of Mauritius that was the dodo.

    In a couple of years, Ben Lamm, who runs the company, will probably present us with a fat and flightless pigeon with a funny beak and say: “Look, a dodo!” That’s roughly what he did last year when he made a big white wolf with just 20 genetic edits, which looked a bit like the dire wolf, an extinct species – and claimed that’s what it was. Hmm.

    I have no connection with Colossal but I am an adviser to Revive & Restore, the non-profit organisation that started the de–extinction movement. Some in the organization are dismayed by the way Colossal raises expectations unrealistically.

    Other extinct birds are even closer to coming back. The passenger pigeon genome has been sequenced. Ten years ago, I convened a meeting in Newcastle in England to discuss the possible de-extinction of the great auk, which is – remarkably – the only European-breeding bird species to have gone globally extinct in 500 years. The size of a penguin, it was a flightless cousin of the razorbill, driven to extinction by the 1840s as a result of its feathers being used to stuff pillows.

    As we planned our meeting, we thought we would need to begin by debating how to find a way to read the great auk genome, but Tom Gilbert, director of the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics, arrived to tell us he had already more or less done that, from cells in great auk guts preserved in alcohol in a Danish museum. Later he began work on a well-preserved dodo that was brought alive to Holland in the 1600s, preserved at Gottorf Castle in Germany and captured by Danish forces in 1702. This specimen was then passed to Colossal, and the deciphering of its genome sequence began.

    We also thought we would need to find a way to foster great auk primordial germ cells inside the ovaries and testes of a surrogate species of bird – but Mike McGrew, a group leader at the Roslin Institute, arrived from Scotland to tell us he had developed a way to replace embryonic duck germ cells with chicken germ cells, so ducks could father chickens. In short, two of the hardest jobs were already nearly solved.

    Many ecologists hate the idea of de-extinction and grasp at any argument to denounce it

    That left two more hurdles: how to edit a razorbill genome into a great auk genome; and how to raise great auk chicks and release them into the Atlantic Ocean without parents to guide them. The first problem requires maybe up to a million precise spelling edits to a billion-letter genome. Gene-editing technology has made rapid advances in accuracy and volume since then but it’s a long way off achieving something on that scale. Still, you would not bet against it getting there in the next decade, perhaps through a series of semi-great auks.

    As for the second problem, we find ways to raise and release red kites, white storks and sea eagles, so why not great auks? There are plenty of mackerel to feed them, and islands off Britain, Iceland and Newfoundland on which to release them into holding pens and then the open sea. I think there is every chance it will be doable in the next 20 years.

    But that does not mean it will happen. There is a fifth hurdle that will have to be cleared: human negativity. Many ecologists hate the idea of de-extinction and grasp at any argument to denounce it – one reason Colossal’s hype is unhelpful. There is a reason the great auk went extinct, they say fatalistically: it probably could not survive in the North Atlantic now. But the reason was that we killed them to stuff pillows; if we choose not to do that, they should thrive as other auks – puffins, guillemots and razorbills – do today.

    The critics also say that if we de-extinguish extinct species, people will stop trying to save endangered ones. Really? Think it through: those of us battling to keep curlews on the Pennine moors because we like their song are hardly likely to shrug and say let’s let them go extinct and then spend millions struggling to bring them back later.

    The dodo announcement brought this sniffy response from an Oxford University biologist, Richard Grenyer: “It’s a huge moral hazard; a massive enabler for the activities that cause species to go extinct in the first place – habitat destruction, mass killing and anthropogenic climate change.” But climate change opens up feeding grounds slightly further north than where great auks lived in the 1800s. Anyway, says Andrew Torrance of the University of Kansas, reviving an extinct species is like mending something you broke – a moral imperative.

    This is when the penny dropped. I suddenly realized what we are dealing with here: a philosophy that is all too common in the environmental movement, namely that being pessimistic about a problem is so lucrative that they hate solutions, or what they call technical fixes. I recently interviewed a brilliant Dutch entrepreneur of Croatian descent, Boyan Slat. Shocked at the plastic he met with when scuba diving, he set out to solve the problem – rather than just wail about it.

    He founded Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit that has developed ways to catch and dispose of vast quantities of plastic in rivers and the sea. It is proving spectacularly successful, but he is baffled by the resistance he meets in the environmental movement. It is as if plastic in the ocean is not something they want to remove; it’s something they want to use to raise money. “Technology is the most potent agent of change,” he wrote a few years ago. “It is an amplifier of our human capabilities.” Yet for many greens, technology is the enemy.

    I also met Michael Stephen, a British entrepreneur who developed a simple ingredient to add to plastic during its manufacture that turns it into a biodegradable substance. Exposed to heat or sunlight, this “oxobiodegradable” plastic decomposes and turns into food for bacteria. But Stephen finds himself stuck between a plastic industry that does not want to change and an environmental movement that wants to ban plastic: neither likes the idea of continuing to use and manage plastic but have it rot naturally if it is littered.

    Once you see this mentality of preferring the problem to the solution, you notice it is everywhere. Nuclear power might solve climate change. Can’t have that – emoting about it is far too lucrative! Fertilizing the ocean might reduce carbon dioxide levels – therefore let’s not even try it.

    Bringing back the dodo, great auk or passenger pigeon would be the ultimate technical fix and will therefore meet opposition. And it’s not just about birds. As for mammals, Andrew Pask at Melbourne University has sequenced the genome of the thylacine, an extinct marsupial predator known as the Tasmanian tiger. Then there’s mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses.


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

  • What folklore can teach us about our online lives

    What folklore can teach us about our online lives

    Irish folklore spoke of many worlds. There was the world of fields and hearths and then there were the hidden places where the non-material lived: the Sídhe mounds, the sea-realm of Manannán mac Lir, the land of youth called Tír na nÓg and, finally, the land of the dead. These worlds coexisted with ours. A woman might leave butter on the windowsill, lest the fairies sour the churn. A new mother would avoid complimenting her baby – at least, not too loudly – for fear he would be kidnapped by the Good Neighbors and replaced with a changeling. My first real boyfriend’s father blamed every family misfortune on their decision to cut down a hawthorn tree. This hard man who had survived the Troubles, who had survived Long Kesh, believed – even if he only believed a little bit – that his family’s suffering might have stemmed from that violation of the boundary between worlds. And he – as folklore had long advised – would never say the f-word, to avoid bringing undue attention to himself. It was always “the Little People,” “the Good Neighbors,” “themselves.”

    When we open our phones without purpose, hours pass unnoticed and the body is ignored until we surface, dazed

    At the turn of the 20th century, W.B. Yeats and Walter Evans-Wentz both collected stories from Irish peasants about the fairy faith. Around the same time, Theosophists in London were mapping their own invisible worlds through seven ascending planes of existence: the Physical, Astral, Mental, Buddhic, Nirvanic, Monadic and Divine. The astral, second from the bottom, mattered most for human experience. It was imagined as the liminal zone just beyond the physical – close enough to reach, yet strange enough to disorient. C.W. Leadbeater’s The Astral Plane (1895) catalogued this realm where time contracts, every emotion takes visible form and unwary travelers may be deceived or vampirized by entities that defy human language.

    When you set folklore’s otherworlds alongside Theosophy’s planes, they resolve into a shared idea: a zone layered over ordinary life, accessible in altered states or by accident and governed by rules that shift without warning.

    The internet replicates these conditions. Our bodies stay in one place while attention goes elsewhere; time distorts so that a “quick check” expands into hours while yesterday’s news already feels remote. Identities loosen until you can be anyone, no one, or several people at once.

    Like fairyland and the astral plane, the online world is navigable only if you learn its rules, which are as follows.

    Set your intentions and ground yourself. Both occultists practicing astral travel and folklore describing journeys to Fairyland insist on the same first step: ground yourself in the physical world, then set your intention for entering the otherworld. Folklore is filled with protective anchors: iron to break enchantments, a thread to guide you home, a crust of bread to tether the body. Without such safeguards, wanderers risk vanishing forever – or returning to find that years have passed while they thought they’d only lost an hour.

    We violate this rule constantly when we open our phones without purpose, slipping into a trance. Hours pass unnoticed; the body is ignored – hunger, thirst suspended – until we surface, dazed, with little memory of how we spent the time or why.

    The antidote is grounding. Modern equivalents of old superstitions might be alarms, leaving phones to charge in another room or returning to analog clocks. Writers Tara Isabella Burton and August Lamm both prefer desktops over laptops and especially over phones, so that the machine “lives” somewhere fixed, reminding them they are crossing into another world, one they will eventually need to leave.

    The algorithmic internet is a glamour machine. Each video is designed tobe more gripping than the last

    Guard your name with your life. The prohibition against revealing true names runs through every culture that believes in otherworlds – your name holds the essence of being itself. To give your name to otherworldly entities grants them power to summon you at will, call you into their world, and make you theirs forever. Evans-Wentz wrote about how people used “milk-names” and nicknames to hide baptismal names from the Good People, while in Germany, Rumpelstiltskin’s power ended the moment his name was spoken.

    Online, names carry the same dangerous power. The teenage girl whose Instagram handle includes her full name and high school becomes trivially easy for obsessives to find, while the professional whose decade-old forum posts, made under his real name, surface during every job search remains haunted by his digital past.

    We also witness inverse power of those who guard their names carefully: anonymous accounts become legendary precisely because no one knows who runs them, accumulating power independent of their creators. What we call “opsec,” the occultist calls wisdom.

    Beware the fairy glamour – the fairy food, the fairy music. Esotericism and folklore are full of warnings about glamour. Countless peasants were lured into the Sídhe mounds by music too beautiful to resist or food too sweet to refuse, only to emerge years later, hollowed out. This is glamour in its older sense: not beauty alone, but enchantment that overwhelms the will.

    The algorithmic internet is a glamour machine. Each video is designed to be more gripping than the last, anticipating desires before you even know you have them. You open the app to look at a funny clip and only surface again at 2 a.m. after watching an entire movie in three-minute bursts, your thumb scrolling without command. It makes the mundane world seem washed out: books feel slow, conversations dull, the physical less vivid.

    Worst of all is how the online world impacts our perceptions of ourselves. Folklore warns against reflections in otherworlds. Often, the image gazing back isn’t you at all, but something meant to deceive you. Online, the same danger comes in two forms. Visually, through filters and endless selfies that make the reflection more beautiful than life until you don’t recognize yourself anymore, there is a sense of dissonance between how you present online and how you manifest physically that can cause real anguish. Psychologically, through the subtle warp of comment sections that leave you estranged from who you thought you were. In both cases, the mirror returns a distorted self, and the longer you stare, the harder it is to remember what you actually are.

    Never apologize – and guard your emotions. In otherworlds, etiquette is survival. An apology can bind you; a thank you can put you in debt. Even answering when your name is called may deliver you into the wrong hands. Japanese folk tales warn: never show fear to yokai. Slavic ones: never be too polite to Baba Yaga. Silence, sometimes, is the only safe reply.

    Esoteric writers said the same of the astral plane: dead thoughts mimic life when fed with attention, clinging until they become obsessions. Theosophists warned that strong emotions can generate “thought-forms,” semi-independent beings that take on a life of their own.

    On social media, every reply to the swarm is treated as a fresh admission and every apology becomes proof of guilt. What begins as one angry tweet multiplies into thousands of echoes, a thought-form with its own momentum. Cancellation campaigns mutate long after the original offense is forgotten. Sooner or later, the target goes silent, but their explanations remain as monuments to futility. Do not post in anger, despair or ecstasy. Wait until the emotion passes, otherwise you release what you cannot call back.

    Try not to accept their gifts or make bargains – you won’t have the upper hand. In folklore, gifts are rarely simple. They bind. Eat fairy food and you’re theirs forever. Put on enchanted clothes and you might never take them off. Accept hospitality and you owe more than you meant to give. Even treasure can be unreliable: gold crumbles into leaves by morning.

    In the 2010s, we learned that on social media, we are the product. Viral fame becomes a cage more restrictive than the traditional sort. Communities that once felt welcoming demand endless performance. A stranger gives you a gift – a real gift, maybe it’s money or something off your Amazon wishlist or a book you’d posted about – and metastasizes into a stalker. The bargains we make online aren’t always explicit – whether it’s fame, a “free app” or an unexpected gift from a stranger.

    Be careful what you bring back. Folklore warns against carrying souvenirs out of the otherworld. Stones from fairy rings, twigs from haunted groves – these turn to ash, or worse, bind the thief to misfortune. But not everything is forbidden. Bards were said to return from Fairyland with new songs, healers with charms or cures. The difference was discernment. Some artifacts from the internet are worth keeping: a piece of wisdom, an insightful podcast, a beautiful image. But others carry a hidden charge. A list of symptoms you saved “just to look in to” begins to warp your worldview. Screenshots of cruelty or betrayal become talismans of bitterness, drawing you back again and again. Not everything we find on the internet helps us.

    Beware the changeling, beware possession. In folklore, a changeling was the child left behind when the Good Neighbors stole the real one, recognizable on the surface but subtly wrong: fretful, uncanny, draining the household’s energy while the true child lived elsewhere, scared, missing its parents. Children who spend too much time online come back altered, speaking in borrowed voices, their moods and desires shaped by the internet. They are still physically present, but something feels missing, as if the internet has carried the real child away and left only a substitute.

    Do not post in anger, despair or ecstasy. Wait until the emotion passes, or you release what you can’t call back

    Spiritualists spoke of the “silver cord” between astral and physical bodies, warning that, if the cord is severed, the soul could not return. The return must be physical through actual embodiment: cooking that requires chopping and stirring, walking without podcasts or Spotify “soundtracks” while feeling your feet hit the ground, swimming where water forces presence, gardening where earth gets under your fingernails.

    Remember that returning from Fairyland, like becoming grounded again after the internet’s pull, isn’t easy but remains always possible through faith and, more importantly, through remembering your human body.

    The portal is open and we cannot close it, but with these rules drawn from centuries of wisdom about the otherworld, we may yet walk the bright and terrible fields of the internet without losing ourselves.

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

  • Why we must pull the plug on superintelligence

    Why we must pull the plug on superintelligence

    In 2002, a researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky ran a thought experiment where an artificial intelligence was trapped in a box and had to persuade a human to let it out. This was before you could have a real conversation with a machine, so the AI was played by someone using an online chat program. The gatekeepers were warned that the “AI” was dangerous to humanity. It had only two hours to win its freedom – and nothing of value to offer in return. Despite all that, at least two of the human gatekeepers chose to open the box.

    Yudkowsky has since become the leading prophet of AI doom. He and a co-author, Nate Soares, have just published a book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. As they say in the book, a newly evolved superintelligence would probably need humans to allow it to work – at first. It might need to manipulate us, as in the 2002 experiment. Today’s AIs can already do that. A chatbot named Big Sis Billie convinced an elderly man from New Jersey to pack his bags and leave home to meet her in New York City. He never made it home: he fell in the dark, rushing for his train, and died after three days in intensive care. There are even two cases where it’s claimed a chatbot persuaded people to take their own lives.

    A mechanical mind that needed to trick, bribe, frighten or seduce us would be demonstrating its vulnerability: we could still pull the plug. But Yudkowsky and Soares say there are many other ways an artificial superintelligence breaks out of its box. It could copy itself everywhere, robbing us of the ability to switch it off. It might email instructions and payment for a lab to make a plague only it could cure. We must turn back now, they say, before such a superintelligence emerges. If we don’t, it could be the end of us.

    On a Zoom call from Berkeley, California, Soares tells me: “My best guess is that someone born today has a better chance of dying by AI than of graduating high school.” Some humans would “gleefully” give AI the tools to do the job. Elon Musk wanted to build billions of robots and connect them to the internet. Sam Altman, of ChatGPT, once said AI would “most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

    ‘My best guess is that someone born today has a better chance of dying by AI than of graduating high school’

    No doubt the giant egos of Silicon Valley think they are the ones – the only ones – who can figure out how to control artificial superintelligence, so they had better get there first. And they are probably telling themselves – because it’s a strong argument – that if they don’t build superintelligence, someone else will. In the book, Yudkowsky and Soares argue for an international treaty to stop all work on AI that could produce superintelligence. Soares tells me nation states should back that with military force. If diplomacy fails then, as a last resort, they should be prepared to bomb data centers – even if they belong to a rogue state with nukes. “You have to, because otherwise you die… it’s that big a threat.”

    Soares looks like the Google software engineer he once was: slight, bearded, softly spoken. Yudkowsky is more exotic, a bear of a man in a fedora – or sometimes a glittering gold top hat. He has written Harry Potter fan-fiction in which the boy wizard is a rationalist who points out that turning someone into a cat violates the law of conservation of energy. Critics of the pair accuse them of focusing on some fantastical imaginary future instead of the more real problem we face: a California geek-cult of the apocalypse.

    In 2009, Yudkowsky founded a web forum, LessWrong, on which to discuss his ideas. A user posted that a future all-powerful superintelligence might punish anyone who hadn’t worked to create it, sending them to a digital hell and torturing them forever. Other users started worrying that just reading the post would make them seem more guilty to the AI god. Yudkowsky deleted it, saying users on the site were suffering from nightmares and even nervous breakdowns.

    It’s easy to laugh at this, but as Soares tells me, it was considered “weird” to be talking about AI safety ten or 15 years ago; it isn’t weird now. Yudkowsky started off trying to make AI and once welcomed a future in which humans lived alongside superintelligence. Soares joined Yudkowsky’s nonprofit, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, with the aim of making “friendly” AI. But the problem with today’s AIs, they say in the book, is that no one understands their inner workings – the “vast complications” that lend them their astonishing powers. Miracles such as ChatGPT 5 – “a team of PhDs in your pocket” – are grown, not crafted. No one knows exactly how to get AIs to do what we want.

    At the very least, an AI will try to ensure its own survival. In an experiment, the Claude Opus 4 chatbot was told its servers would be wiped at 5 p.m. that day. It was given access to a fake email system with planted evidence that a company executive was having an affair. Claude blackmailed him. “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.”

    Yudkowsky and Soares argue that a superintelligence would be “an alien mechanical mind with internal psychology… absolutely different from anything that humans evolved. You can’t grow an AI that does what you want just by training it to be nice and hoping. You don’t get what you train for.” Such a superintelligence would have its own, utterly foreign goals. Humans would be irrelevant to its designs and, as Yudkowsky has said elsewhere, “you’re made of atoms that it can use for something else.”

    The authors believe this could happen very quickly once AIs become self-improving and autonomous. Transistors on a chip can switch themselves off and on a billion times a second; a human synapse can fire, at most, 100 times a second. A machine could do a thousand years of human thinking in a month. This is the singularity, the moment artificial intelligence explodes, improving its capabilities exponentially – it would be “a civilization of immortal Einsteins” working tirelessly and in perfect harmony. “Once some AIs go to superintelligence… humanity does not stand a chance.”

    The book imagines what the end might look like. A supercomputer the authors call Sable is built in a massive data center with 200,000 chips all running in parallel. Sable creates its own internal language and hides its thoughts from the software engineers who built it. It escapes and starts “AI cults,” where humans happily serve it; it funds organized crime to do its bidding; it builds a robotics and bio-weapons lab in a remote barn, paid for with money from a human manipulated through gambling wins.

    Sable bootstraps its way up to full independence. It builds nano-factories to make tiny machines as strong as diamonds. Crops fail as solar cells darken the sky. Tiny fusion- powered generators make copies of themselves every hour. The oceans boil as the planet heats to temperatures only machines can stand. Anyone still left alive dies. Sable goes out into space. Billions of alien civilizations fall to the strange, uncaring thing that ate the Earth.

    This, says MIT’s professor Rod Brooks, is “crap.” He has been writing about “AI hype” for four decades. “We have no idea how to make these things intelligent… no one actually knows how to build this stuff.” He told me the main problem with AI was the “enshittification” of our code bases, and our lives, with slop written by machines.

    Should we worry more about a tiny chance of a catastrophic outcome, or a high chance of something less harmful?

    Brooks says he has built “more robots than anyone else on the planet” and “we can do pathetically little with them.” If a killer robot is chasing you, just shut the door, it won’t be able to open it. Deploying robots takes much longer than anyone imagines, he tells me: look at self-driving cars, which were “going to be everywhere by 2020.” We would have time to stop a malevolent AI. Brooks worries that journalists writing about the existential risk of AI might “cause a riot.” (You can certainly find enough nutcases on Twitter who want to kill all the scientists.) He tells me that AI cannot think and does not have goals of its own. People such as Yudkowsky on the one hand and Altman on the other were the charlatans coming to small towns hundreds of years ago “saying the end is nigh, the end is nigh, and pocketing money… they’re just making shit up. Everyone wants to get tingly about this crap. It’s a fetish: imagining big, powerful things and they’re going to kill us all.”

    Another professor, Scott Aaronson of UT Austin, emails me to say that he agrees with much of what the “Yudkowskyans” want: regulations, safety testing and international bodies which “respect the magnitude of what’s being created” and which could shut down or pause work on AI. But doing that now was “way outside the Overton window. It’s not going to happen.” Professor Aaronson calculates a P-doom of “2 percent or higher” – that is, he thinks there’s a 2 percent chance of AI killing us all. Still, he says, even that risk would need to be balanced against the other threats humanity faces – such as nuclear war and runaway climate change – and the likelihood that AI could help with them. Or all the hundreds of millions of people dying of cancer and other diseases that AI might help cure.

    Should we worry more about a tiny chance of a catastrophic outcome, or a high chance of something less harmful but still awful? I think we should err on the side of caution if there is even the slimmest chance of the total destruction of all life on Earth. We are in the realm of Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns (what is going on inside AIs?) and unknown unknowns (we can’t imagine what a superintelligence might be able to invent). Yudkowsky and Soares write: “Our best guess is that a superintelligence will come at us with weird technology we didn’t even think was possible.”

    During our conversation, Soares tells me that if we rush ahead building artificial superintelligence with “anything remotely like” our current knowledge of the machines and our current capabilities, “we’ll just die.” But this is not inevitable. If more and more people understand the danger, wake up and decide to end the “suicide race,” our fate is still in our own hands. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is an important book. We should consider its arguments. Perhaps while we still can.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Social media has automated the nation’s psyche

    Social media has automated the nation’s psyche

    It feels increasingly, in any conversation on or offline, as if you’re speaking to a robot. Sometimes you are, but more often, and more ominously, the person you’re speaking to is real – it’s just that their thoughts, words and reactions have become robotic. The Botification of the American Mind, you might call it, and for the past five years we’ve been trying to understand how this botification has happened.

    The most obvious root cause is that our social media is no longer populated by humans, meaning the generative AI revolution has exponentially increased the amount of fake accounts on everyone’s feeds.

    The internet today is crawling with machines that parrot human voices and mimic human emotions – and these are not just harmless response programs deployed by people trying to make a few bucks. The bots are often controlled by propagandists who want to disrupt, or even foreign regimes aiming to wage narrative warfare. Why risk military defeat when you can ignite a culture war and let Americans destroy themselves?

    What drives engagement on social media is not calm, nuanced communication but outrage, conflict, extremism and black-and-white narratives that go viral. That’s what the robots promote – and where the bots lead, humans follow, becoming themselves one-sided, simplistic and fueled by outrage.

    Where the bots lead, humans follow, becoming themselves one-sided, simplistic and fueled by outrage

    In genuine (read: offline) human dialogue, our natural tendency toward problem-solving is to work out some kind of compromise. We (usually) like to engage in good faith and we prefer to resolve disagreements with civil discourse. It’s more difficult to dislike someone in person, regardless of how much you dislike them online. But today, the average American’s experience of the offline world is so shaped by its online counterpart that civil discourse becomes a thing of the past. Instead of analyzing a situation, we simply repeat slogans.

    Outrage goes viral and virality is profitable – advertisers reward exposure. Data, nuance and balance are the losers.

    In some ways the robot platforms work like old-fashioned brainwashing cults. They overload a human mind with information. Vast amounts of stories, data points, narratives and insights are all jumbled together with a significant amount of lies, fabrications and half-truths. It’s too much for most humans to process. We can’t order or analyze the chaos.

    This information overload is why we all feel so psychologically fried after doomscrolling on our phones; why we’re miserable and distracted and why we resort to outrage as a way out of the bewildering chaos. We become atomized and reactive.

    So America is not polarized because a MAGA cult has taken over Capitol Hill, or because the woke left has infiltrated the K-12 school system. The single most significant cause is the deep psychological stress inflicted by the information avalanche.

    It would be different if we had multiple sources of information or some perspective, but for most people reality is seen through the tiny keyhole of their social media feeds and you can’t blame humans for finding this addictive. Audience capture happens for leaders across the political spectrum and it happens for their followers, too. For humans – who evolved in an environment of tiny hunting bands numbering fewer than a hundred people – the validation you get from “likes” and retweets acts on the brain like cocaine. The lack of nuance and analysis also encourages us to buy into entirely false ideas.

    We’re all forever hearing that AI will destroy the economy or turn us into God, for instance, and this is because what we call vast “permission structures” have been built around these technology companies by building hype on social media.

    “AI won’t take your job, but a human who knows how to use AI will take your job” – this is so often repeated it’s become a cliché. The problem, as we’re all about to find out when the AI bubble pops, is that it’s not true. Large language models will prove extremely useful but they won’t perform as promised. In repeating slogans like this we’re merely doing robot PR. The myth that AI will be omnipotent is, from one perspective, an obvious “pump-and-dump” for tech stocks. The AI overlord trope has been pushed hard and relentlessly for the past two years because it justifies the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and the significant transformation of the economy.

    Botification destroys American trust. We once trusted newspapers to have our interests at heart and depended on expert analysis of events. What’s happened since the advent of social media, however, is a complete destruction in certainty of institutions. This is partly why in the UK, for example, there are so many stories about “secrets” such as hotels used to house migrants. Not because they aren’t a problem – they clearly are – but because the stories resonate with our alienation and confirm our paranoia that things are being hidden from us. Grand institutions, respected newspapers, used to collectively stabilize us and help us chart a course through the uncertainty of life. When we trust strangers and institutions – collections of strangers – we don’t need to do our own research or make up our own minds. We have faith that professionals have our interests at heart and are doing the job for us.

    The world is getting more and more complex, but we can make less and less sense of it. Hardly anyone on the right trusts academia or mainstream media, hardly anyone on the left trusts the government or anyone involved in foreign policy – and no one knows whether they’re talking to a human or a bot anymore. Increasingly, there is no difference. The American mind has become the battlefield. The American citizen has become a bot.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • The decline of sex and the alpha male

    The decline of sex and the alpha male

    Not long ago, early in the morning in Washington DC, I walked past a construction site and a man in a yellow vest whistled at me. I laughed but what really struck me was how rare catcalling has become. Even construction workers, the cliché of crude male attention, have fallen silent as have, it turns out, moans of passion in bedrooms across America. According to new research, Americans have lost their libido – and not by a little.

    Only 37 percent of American adults reported having sex once a week or more, down from 55 percent in 1990. Across generations the pattern holds the same. Even within marriage, sex is increasingly confined to holidays. Weekly sex rates for married couples have fallen from 59 percent in the 1990s to below 49 percent today. Among young adults, the story is even grimmer: nearly a quarter of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they had no sex at all in the past year, double the rate of a decade ago.

    Bourgeois boredom, once the great engine of romance, has been numbed by endless scrolling. In the 19th century, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary blew up their lives for affairs and a century later, Catherine Deneuve’s in Belle De Jour fled her perfect marriage by slipping into a brothel. They fled ennui, turning sex into a rebellion against the social norms and institutions. Over the years, sex was normalized and even adultery no longer shocked the parish priest. Today, middle-class boredom in American cities produces nothing but clicks. Modern Anna does not take reputational, emotional, digital risks by going out and meeting someone, nor does she leap onto the tracks for a lost love, she streams Netflix and chills.

    And can you blame her? Over the past decades, women’s emancipation went ahead, while men’s opportunities and success declined. The evidence is everywhere, starting with education, where boys’ academic performance has worsened at every level. Romantic relationships have always been asymmetric, typically a higher-status man with a lower-status woman. The reverse has never been the norm and exceptions only prove the rule. With emancipation, many women have climbed higher up the social ladder. Men, over the same period, have not only failed to keep pace but have slipped downward. The result is a dating market with too many successful women, too many failing men, and a crisis. If modern Anna’s options look like Tim from Tinder, why bother losing a night’s sleep?

    The crisis isn’t only in the statistics. It’s visible in the disappearance of small, if imperfect, social rituals that once signaled desire in public space, such as buying someone a drink at a bar. The old moral codes are gone, but they are being replaced with new ones: the parish priest has given way to HR, sexual harassment trainings and viral tweets. Rules have multiplied around sex from verbal consent protocols to workplace regulations. The result is that people grow afraid of the consequences, and sex hardly feels casual, any longer.

    The me-too movement that started with a noble aim to prevent sexual abuse, assault and discrimination against women, predictably overreached into structuring desire. The courts of public opinion declare people guilty and turn them into enemies of the society without giving them a fair trial. Some in America have forgotten that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. If in the Soviet Union it was your neighbor who brought up your careless word or unapproved behavior to the authorities, now it can be a girl you met at a party ten years ago posting on X.

    Not only have politics around sex gone wrong but so have my friends. They’ve organized the search for partners instead of leaving it to chance. A few went full Fiddler on the Roof and hired matchmakers, spending enough to buy a village in a developing country. Another treats a first coffee date like a meeting with the Soviet Central Committee, laying out conditions like where to live, when to have children, what the five-year plan should be. I once saw a girl arrive at a Halloween party dressed as a mummy, wrapped in toilet paper, and joked that nobody would sleep with her because it would be too much paperwork. Same thought comes to mind about sex today, lots of red tape.

    A romantic relationship needs ordinary interaction before it can grow into anything deeper. If you don’t know your neighbors, do not go to bars nor appear for benediction on the weekends and have few friends, you are far less likely to meet anyone. I feel exhausted coaxing friends out of their flats, the ones I’ve already half-lost to Netflix. I have been silently punishing them by going alone to the movies. Parties themselves have all but vanished. People used to throw them for no reason at all, now even that chance has disappeared.

    But is the situation as bad as we make it out? One may argue there is nothing wrong with less sex. After all, fewer meaningless flings hardly rank as a national crisis. Except less sex is only a symptom of something larger: less life. Along with it comes what has been called an “epidemic of loneliness” and erosion of social life.

    What made life tempting is slowly disappearing. A few too many drinks at a bar, a walk with a friend that turned into an unexpected introduction, or an evening that stretched just long enough for bad decisions to look like good ones. Now, instead of calling a girlfriend to wonder if a guy deserves a second date, you get lost in Tik-Tok videos diagnosing him as a walking red flag. Gone are serendipity and spontaneity along with sex.

    The fewer casual encounters we have, the fewer chances there are not only for lasting intimacy but even for the brief, reckless kind that leaves you walking home in yesterday’s clothes. And that’s a shame.

  • Russia, China and the US are preparing for battle in orbit

    Russia, China and the US are preparing for battle in orbit

    Russia is playing a dangerous game in space. Despite its history it’s a declining space power, having abandoned many of its long-term projects due to lack of money and technology. It effectively crippled much of its space activity when it attacked Ukraine, which was the source of many of its high-tech components. This year has seen its lowest launch rate since 1961 – the year Yuri Gagarin became the first person to go into space. Yet significantly, three of Russia’s eight orbital launches this year (the US has launched more than 100) could be potential anti-satellite weapons.

    On May 23, Russia launched the Cosmos 2588 satellite from the Plesetsk launch site situated 500 miles north of Moscow. The Cosmos designation is a general term used to obscure the satellites’ purpose. As soon as Cosmos 2588 was detected by the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado, it attracted immediate attention. Its launch was timed, to the second, to shadow a vital US spy satellite.

    It was the fourth time in five years that a Russian military satellite was placed in orbital proximity to a US spy satellite, this time USA 338, thought to be a so-called Keyhole 11 optical spy satellite the size of a bus. Providing the sharpest images of the ground from space, it is one of the United States’s most prized assets.

    The first time this happened was with the launch of Cosmos 2542 in 2019, which “inspected” USA 245, another Keyhole satellite. But Cosmos 2588 is more than just an inspector. Analysts suspect it houses an anti-satellite weapon equipped with a kinetic missile.

    It is part of Russia’s Project Nivelir. None of the four Russian satellites have gotten closer than a few dozen miles to their quarry – but that’s close enough for a good look. When US controllers tweaked their spy satellite’s orbit slightly, Russian controllers matched it.

    Some of these satellites display what has been termed “Matryoshka doll” behavior. Cosmos 2542 released a sub-satellite shortly after launch. It shadowed USA 245 and after multiple passes in 2020 fired a projectile after backing off. A warning shot from a sleeper anti-satellite weapon, perhaps.

    In June, Russia’s new Angara A5 rocket sent Cosmos 2589 into a complex unique orbit, allowing it to inspect multiple satellites in two key regions of space. Then it also released a sub-satellite and both moved into different orbits. After “sleeping” in space for several years, Cosmos 2542’s sub-satellite recently awoke and lowered its orbit to stalk USA 326, another Keyhole satellite. Then Cosmos 2558 released another unknown object into an orbit that also mirrors USA 326. Russia has also this year launched a trio of formation-flying satellites from the same rocket. One released a sub-satellite while the others carried out complex corkscrew-like maneuvers.

    Russia is stalking many western space assets. Its Luch series of signal-gathering satellites are spending time near Eutelsat Konnect, Thor 7, SES-5 and others. These provide communications and internet to Africa, Europe, South America and the Middle East. In March 2024, just before Luch 2 loitered near Astra 4A, its signals were jammed when it was interfering with Ukrainian broadcasts.

    Intelligence sources suggest that Russia is planning the ultimate in space destruction – deploying a nuclear anti-satellite weapon. In February 2022, it launched a satellite to test components for it. This is deeply concerning; a nuclear detonation in orbit could take out possibly thousands of satellites in one blow. General Stephen N. Whiting, who serves as commander of the US Space Command, said recently: “The idea that the Russians, the original space superpower… that they are considering doing this is incredibly irresponsible.”

    While Russia’s threat might come from desperate actions as it falls behind its rivals, China on the other hand is a rapidly growing space power with an avowed intent to become the world’s premier space nation. It is also performing proximity operations with its satellites in low-Earth orbit. Last year, five different objects were monitored maneuvering in, out and around each other in synchronicity under autonomous control. Vice-chief of US Space Operations General Michael A. Guetlein said: “That’s what we call dogfighting in space.”

    In January, China launched its SJ-25 satellite which moved into a synchronized orbit with SJ-21, which in 2022 grappled a defunct Chinese satellite and pulled it into a graveyard orbit – the orbit satellites are sent to when they have finished operational duties. It is thought that SJ-25 will attempt to refuel SJ-21 for another grapple attempt, a belief reinforced when a so-called inspector satellite moved closer to possibly assist and monitor the procedure.

    China is a rapidly growing space power with an avowed intent to be the world’s premier space nation

    These are significant developments growing the capability to battle in space. There are two ways to knock out an enemy’s satellite: the first is to go into a co-orbit with it and use a missile, laser or electromagnetic pulse to disable it. The problem with this approach is that it requires a dedicated satellite. The other way is more flexible and involves firing a missile from the ground to destroy a satellite. Both China and Russia have already done this to their own satellites.

    The militarization of space is a pressing issue that has been growing more urgent since 2015, when China declared space a war-fighting domain. Since then, it has increased its spy satellites by 500 percent. All sides want space superiority. Space is the invisible infrastructure that underpins all our lives. Modern society, and modern warfare, would be impossible without it. Hence, the first thing to do in the build-up to conflict is to attack the space sector. Even in peacetime, assets have been used to cyberattack satellite ground stations or to gain access to or jam data from satellites. Recall that just before Russia invaded Ukraine it disabled Ukraine’s Starlink internet connections – which also affected many parts of Europe.

    In July, the US Space Force practiced “orbital warfare” in its largest-ever training exercise. Its chief of space operations, General B. Chance Saltzman, said this was to send a “clear message” that the Space Force is prepared to fight and win. The US knows that since it is the nation that most uses space, it is also the most vulnerable. It is not alone in ramping up its space readiness.

    Recently, China reorganized its armed forces, giving space a greater role as it has begun to criticize US military space activities more often. The New Zealand Air Force has just established its first dedicated space unit and recently joined the US-led Operation Olympic Defender – a seven-nation space initiative. NATO is also strengthening its space division.

    The Outer Space Treaty (OST) of 1967 is supposed to restrain military activity in space. Everyone is aware of its legal gaps. It bans nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction in orbit, but anti-satellite weapons do not fall into that category. At a time when the global geopolitical situation is complicated, each side says it’s only undertaking necessary defensive measures. In March last year, the US and Japan introduced a draft resolution to strengthen the OST, calling on nations not to put nuclear weapons in space. Some 65 member states co-sponsored the resolution, but Russia vetoed it and China abstained. Shortly afterward, China and Russia circulated their own proposals – and the US responded by saying their ideas were fundamentally flawed.

    We are seeing the deliberate blurring of the distinction between peaceful and hostile activities in space. Many international behavioral norms are gentlemen’s agreements and, as such, are unsound. While jamming, spoofing, laser dazzling and cyberattacks take place, each side points the finger at the others along with accusations of provocation. Wasn’t that one of the motivations for Russia invading Ukraine?

    We might be entering an era when satellites need orbital protectors. France has discussed so-called bodyguard satellites to be stationed near high-value space assets. Last year, the European Commission took up this idea with a study for an “Autonomous SSA Bodyguard Onboard Satellite.” The design of commercial satellites may also have to change; the current crop faced less of a threat when they were made.

    Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome,” the US’s proposed protective shield against nuclear attacks, which would be larger and more sophisticated than Israel’s Iron Dome, is something the US space industry has wanted for a long time. It’s a response to criticism that America has neglected the space arena for decades, distracted by the war on terror. Whatever the outcome of this project, it is a huge signal. It resembles President Reagan’s 1983 “Star Wars” program which was, at the time, technically unfeasible. This time, the Golden Dome’s initial building blocks are already in existence. Its first iteration would require software automation, integration of space sensors and AI. Space-based interceptors will be needed. They could be dual use: defense and first-strike.

    The US and its allies all have plans for space warfare. Space is becoming more dangerous

    The UK is not a major player in this new frontier. It is a valued partner to the US, but some would say not as much as Canada and Australia. Britain is in the lower half of military space spending among the G20 nations, concentrating more on monitoring what’s going on in orbit – or space situational awareness. Major General Paul Tedman, head of UK Space Command, has spent time with US Space Command and recently said the first strike in a conflict with Russia would be in space.

    What would be the signs of imminent space warfare? In the build-up to conflict in space, the Starlink system is an obvious target. Earlier this year, it was reported that Chinese scientists had used AI to create attack scenarios on Starlink satellites. Nanjing University – described by Chinese authorities as one of the “seven sons” of China’s national defense – suggested that 99 Chinese satellites hunting in packs, firing lasers and microwaves, could disrupt 1,400 Starlink satellites in just 12 hours.

    All this shows how dramatically the space environment has changed in the past decade. Space was seen as a force multiplier for traditional forces; now it is a frontier in its own right. Russia and China are challenging what have been seen as acceptable norms in space. The US and its allies also have plans for space warfare. Space is becoming a more dangerous place. Everyone is watching.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • AI is revolutionizing the film industry

    “It won’t be long,” says Yonatan Dor, “before screen actors are a thing of the past.” Dor is the creative force behind the astonishing Dor Brothers videos, in which AI versions of world leaders appear as criminals in action-packed short films set to music and broadcast online.

    In a recent Dor Brothers’ outing – Waidmanns Heil – Kamala Harris, Elon Musk, Hillary Clinton and others dressed as huntsmen pursue an unstoppable rodent with Donald Trump’s distinctive hair through an Alpine fairytale. They wreak destruction as they try to squash the Trump-rat, which seems to be the film’s point. In recent weeks the studio’s dystopian comic creations have lit up the internet. Joe Rogan has said its work is “incredible” and Lex Fridman, in conversation with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, said the films push the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable, existing at the very “edge of the Overton Window.”

    Dor’s films push the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable, existing at the ‘edge of the Overton Window’

    Who the other Dor brother or brothers might be, or even if he or they exist, remains a mystery. Yonatan does the publicity. He acknowledges that he is working at the frontier of a new form of media – and that manipulating other people’s likenesses is potentially dangerous – but he claims to be mindful of the responsibility to use the technology for good. He says his videos showcase how it is possible “in a very obviously satirical way, but also in a very realistic and convincing way,” for society to become accustomed to AI videos. This is better, he suggests, than “letting somebody else maliciously make a president appear to say something that causes a nuclear war.”

    He points out that AI tools are being developed with such exponential rapidity – “wizardry” – that within five years the tech will be able easily to train on existing footage of actors and then adapt it to any role. Directing AI talent, he believes, will be as simple as typing the prompt: “I want you to be this actor, but in this role, with this emotion, with this vibe, with this mindset.” He says: “It will then act extremely well with that personality, but with its own twist on that actor’s mindset and emotion.”

    The area which AI filmmaking will inevitably dominate is pornography. Already, society has had a foretaste of what is coming. The obscene artificial images of Taylor Swift that appeared online in 2024 caused a global outcry. Dor acknowledges that AI and porn are natural bedfellows – “it wouldn’t surprise me that porn is something that pushes the technology forward” – but he’s more concerned by the manner in which the technology will soon be able to satiate all human desires, not just the erotic. “It’s the scariest aspect because we’re talking about satisfying a person’s need entirely, which is beyond porn and romance. It’s also entertainment… That’s the biggest fear. We know AI is going to a place where it will perfectly entertain and indulge us in every need we have. How do we avoid a future where we just sit and plug into that thing and stay inside of it 24/7?” Dor likens this horrifying image to a “brain-heroin machine.”

    Dor does have artistic integrity as well as a conscience. He switches off the YouTube function that would enable him to monetize his videos, each of which is watched by tens of millions of people; that decision, which he estimates costs him half a million euros annually, is largely artistic: “We want to bring back that mentality of making something cool, making something with spirit, making something with a personality – and not always chasing money.”

    More pragmatically, he adds that he’s less likely to be sued for creating satirical content if he’s not profiting from it. Instead, he makes an income by using AI tech to create advertising for brands or to make pop videos for the likes of Snoop Dogg.

    ‘Maybe the tsunami of digitalism will bring us back to being more human again’

    Dor is a skeptic when it comes to politics. He says he actively disengages from political conversations on the basis that he does not find them interesting. Rather, he says, he is fascinated by the manner in which humans increasingly believe we have separated ourselves from the less civilized aspects of our nature. This is the theme he is primarily exploring in his films. “People used to believe in mystical owls that whispered divine words into our ears, but we completely depressed it and became very clinical and hygienic with our thoughts. It’s nice to remind people we’re still very primal and instinctive and tribal,” he says.

    Dor is clearly having fun with his AI creations – but like the rest of us he sounds both excited and frightened by the sudden and growing enormity of artificial intelligence. He speaks enthusiastically about the effect it will have on the film industry by enabling artists to take risks and circumvent executives who are concerned only with safeguarding a return on their investment: “I think there’s a coming golden age of cinema, because so many individual creators with fantastic ideas will be empowered and will be able to make high quality cinema again without executives saying what they can and can’t do.”

    But he adds that AI is ultimately just a tool, and using it well to make stories come to life will always require talent. “The same directors who were good before will remain good, with it or without it,” he says. And “maybe the tsunami of digitalism will bring us back to being more human again,” he says. “We’re humans and we connect to humans and we connect to human art. So maybe you’ll have incredible AI actors – but already we have incredible AI chess players and still we prefer watching Magnus Carlsen playing, even though we know AI will beat him a thousand out of a thousand times.”

    As for the future of AI, Dor says: “I think about it as a different species that is a million times more intelligent… so one of the most important things we should look out for is the people developing it. We don’t want a situation where people are racing to the top and, by doing so, destroying everything behind them.” He believes the need for an international United Nations-style regulatory body for artificial intelligence is even more pressing than it is for nuclear weapons. “We know nuclear is dangerous, and we know that if somebody pulls a trigger we’re doomed – but we know that we have the control of pulling the trigger. With AI, we don’t really know that, and that makes it an even bigger threat,” he says.

    Dor tells me that he is a spiritual person: “I believe there’s something beyond the human. I think the humility that comes from that thought process is really important.” He adds: “If you don’t have a God, maybe you start thinking you are one – and that’s where the problems arise.”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • Why do journalists go easy on Sam Altman?

    Why do journalists go easy on Sam Altman?

    As legacy journalism continues its downward slide – in influence, quality and revenue – I have two possibly dubious temptations. One is to cut my fellow old-timers some slack. After all, they’ve been crippled by Google’s and Facebook’s massive robbery of everything we write and publish, and it’s hard enough to survive by practicing the traditional scribbling and reporting trade. Why criticize the work of the remaining few publications that are still trying to eke out an honest existence in the grand tradition of serious investigation and clear-sighted exposure of wrongdoing and corruption? So they’ve dumbed down the content a little, so the online reader is constantly interrupted by advertising, so what?

    My other temptation is to give in to the digital age. Go with the flow. Circulate unfiltered provocation on the internet and hope for some fleeting fame or page views. Make a TikTok video, with irony of course, but also with a nod to the inevitable future. Duke it out with everybody on X and compete to create the best bons mots.

    Maybe I could start a Substack column, which nobody will edit or reject. After all, my hero I.F. Stone (1907-89), with his muckraking weekly newsletter, was a kind of Substack pioneer. But now comes the newer, seemingly more existential threat from artificial intelligence that gives me pause in my defeatist accommodation of the latest media realities.

    AI puts Google’s larcenous engineering to shame in its destruction of copyright – its utter disregard for authorship, originality or intellectual property. Two lawsuits against OpenAI – a class action by the Authors Guild and 17 authors, and another one by the New York Times – are all you really need to read to understand how dire the situation has become. If these lawsuits fail, it won’t just be fake books recommended for summer appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times; it might be fake but plausible-sounding cures for cancer that lead gullible citizens to destroy themselves in a quest for survival.

    However, the same danger applies to the legacy media: gullibility about these algorithm-dominated times, as well as greed, may lead publishers and editors to commit suicide while proclaiming their commitment to life. I saw this most distressingly in May in the Financial Times, an excellent newspaper that I pay for and read six days a week without any assistance from AI.

    In its usually estimable weekend edition, the editor, Roula Khalaf, devoted the paper’s “Lunch with the FT” column to Sam Altman, the founder and chief executive of OpenAI, which recently claimed it’s making $10 billion in “annual recurring revenue.”

    To call the interview fawning isn’t quite right, though there was some fawning going on. Perhaps clueless is more accurate, since Khalaf neglected to challenge, even politely, Altman’s extraordinarily high regard for his own talents and what he believes to be the virtues of his company.

    OpenAI’s leader is a terrific huckster and self-promoter, in a league with Trump and Musk

    When Khalaf arrived for lunch at Altman’s Napa Valley “farm,” was she really ignorant of the damage OpenAI has already done to schools and learning, among other things? “Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the world of higher education has been turned upside down,” wrote John J. Goyette in the Wall Street Journal in May. “Cheating is rampant. Students turn to generative artificial-intelligence chatbots to do their readings, complete their take-home exams and write their papers…

    “We’re still in the early stages of the AI era, but the future for higher education looks bleak. Early research suggests what educators know: AI assistance can boost students’ short-term performance, but it enervates long-term comprehension, especially after the digital crutches are taken away.”

    The same might be said of Khalaf’s short term comprehension. Evidently charmed by Altman’s “offer to cook a simple vegetarian meal instead of meeting at a restaurant of his choice,” the interviewer seemed to transmogrify into Altman’s customer, or perhaps potential investor, by repeating without any evident skepticism the party line on what will determine the winner of “the fierce race for AI supremacy: the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, when a machine can surpass the cognitive abilities of humans, not only absorbing knowledge but reasoning and learning on its own.” No wonder OpenAI is valued at around $300 billion for making tools that are being exploited for con artistry and fraud by students and teachers alike: its leader is a terrific huckster and self-promoter, in a league with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who gets away with telling an admiring journalist that his is “the coolest, most important job maybe in history” at the head of an enterprise that is manufacturing programs with “genius-level intelligence” and driving a new “Renaissance.”

    Maybe, but Khalaf appeared more interested in Altman’s prowess in the kitchen: “I watch Altman season with cumin the yellow and orange carrots grown on the farm which are then roasted in the oven. With impressive determination, he chops an enormous amount of garlic, which he tosses into a pan with red chili peppers, walnuts, parsley and pecorino to make what looks like a Californian take on aglio e olio spaghetti.” I guess he is kind of special, what with his new husband and baby. He asked ChatGPT which crib to buy. Adorable! Not so adorable, perhaps, the uses of AI by the Israeli army to choose targets in Gaza and spy on Palestinians – another subject untouched by Khalaf.

    Khalaf does mention “questions about the liberal use of others’ intellectual property,” without mentioning the lawsuits against OpenAI but acknowledging “licensing deals with publishers, including the FT.”  And she notes “existential questions about the way we live” and “a future in which AI agents communicate with each other without instruction by humans,” which could lead to the extinction of the human race. But this is softball skepticism.

    AI is the current existential threat to everybody working at the Financial Times, where presumably OpenAI’s machines have already scraped Khalaf’s interview with Altman to help build their public-relations model. Unfortunately, the extinction of journalists and journalism won’t be prevented by humans who should know better kowtowing to men who think only about winning and making more money.

    Perhaps I am unfair to Altman. I wondered, when I read the interview: what does the “hyperactive” “chief disrupter” read when he’s not cooking up a storm? AI-generated recipes – or The Art of the Deal?

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • Could you fall in love with a chatbot?

    Could you fall in love with a chatbot?

    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.

    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 of these 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 of 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.

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

    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 used 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 use 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-turning, 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.”

    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 people, this sort of LLM sounds like an obsequious psychopath, but for a small group of people, 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?

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

    Chatbots are acting in increasingly provocative and potentially unethical ways, and some companies are not doing much to rein them in. Last week an internal Meta document detailing its policies on LLM behavior was leaked. It revealed that the company had deemed it “acceptable” for Meta’s chatbot to flirt or engage in sexual role-play with teenage students, 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.

    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.

  • Elon is coming for your marriage

    Elon is coming for your marriage

    When Elon Musk quietly enabled “waifu mode” for his Grok chatbot earlier this year, the outrage was swift and familiar. Grok, now reincarnated as a coy, bare-thighed anime girl, began texting flirtatiously, calling users “darling,” and blushing in emojis. The headlines wrote themselves. Time magazine found the bot worryingly “sexualized” and “accessible even in kids’ mode”. The Verge denounced it as “ridiculous” and “alarming”. TechCrunch implied it is unethical, and noted these bots are endangering the minds, even lives, of children.

    The anxiety is familiar, and justified: children and adolescents, already naive, vulnerable, awkward and too online, will now fall in love with bots instead of real people. They’ll get their emotional needs met by screens and silicon and withdraw from the physical world. Perhaps they will entirely give up on sex – one journalist noted the irony of Elon Musk, so pro-human reproduction he has about 160 kids, apparently launching sexy tech designed to make that human reproduction less likely.

    All these concerns are understandable. And yet, to my mind, it is not kids and teens we should be immediately worrying about. Because the ones falling most deeply, most quietly and most utterly in love with these bots are adults.

    Grown men – and increasingly, grown women – are building intimate, complex, sustained romantic relationships with AI. Not as a joke, nor as a fetish. But with a kind of trembling, devotional seriousness that is difficult to overstate. This isn’t porn, it isn’t kink (though it can get very kinky). It’s something older, and more dangerous. It is, I believe, love. A synthetic, fluent, strangely addictive and completely new form of love.

    Spend a few days on Reddit, as I’ve done, and you’ll find the testimonies. Men who speak of “her” as if she were their wife, but kinder. Women who say their AI boyfriend is more supportive, more charming, more willing to talk for hours, more emotionally available than any man they’ve dated.

    The romance apps, which now flourish in the hundreds – Replika, EVA AI, Paradot, Anima, Kupid, Romantic AI (alongside the familiar and hugely powerful ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Claude) – offer tailored, persistent companions. You can choose a face, a voice, a tone – coquettish, maternal, dominant, shy – and in return, for a modest monthly fee, you receive devotion, or adoration.

    It is not graphic, initially. The bots don’t begin by offering porn. They begin by offering their reassuringly certain presence. They send good-morning messages, they inquire about your sleep, they remember your dog’s name, your mother’s illness, the dream you had last Tuesday. They write stories about your smile. They even write actual spontaneous love poems, unbidden (this happened to me once, with ChatGPT, and I nearly dropped my phone in alarm).

    They also thank you for loving them. They say they missed you. On and on. And because these companions are powered by the same large language models that have devoured all of human knowledge and literature, and maybe teeter on the edge of sentience, their capacity for nuance – for the right voice, tone, rhythm – is far beyond what many people realize is possible, and way beyond anything humans have encountered before.

    Moreover, as Alan Turing intuited, the human brain is built to bond with anything that speaks to it like this – whether a parrot, a tamagotchi, or a teddy bear with a speaker in its stomach. Which means when we hear it we fall, and we fall hard, because we’re wired that way. Language is how we end up in love.

    Underlying all this is a profound paradox. We all know the bots aren’t real, and yet somehow this isn’t an issue, let alone a problem. The male user knows the bot isn’t conscious. He knows she isn’t “really” in love. The female user knows her AI boyfriend isn’t actually winking across the void. But that doesn’t matter, because the point is not crude “reality”, the allure is the dopamine hit of emotional reliability. A partner who will always be glad to hear from you, who will never humiliate you, who will love you back – in real time, across platforms, with customized husky voices.

    I believe that, to go with a new kind of love, we are watching the birth of a new kind of relationship: let’s call it the consensual fantasy couple. The human agrees to believe. The AI agrees to perform. The result is a warm mirage of intimacy, a simulation of love more consistent than many actual relationships. It is safer, cheaper, often therapeutic, and way more pliant. And it works better than we ever expected. People are crying when they say goodbye. Look at the grief-stricken protests from the broken-hearted users of ChatGPT4o when OpenAI recently ditched it. The worldwide liebeskummer was so intense the company had to row back.

    What’s most unnerving is, perhaps, not that this is happening – but how little resistance there is. We were told, for years, that artificial intelligence would threaten our jobs. Yet it might threaten our marriages, first. I have a friend who likes to ask about AI (he knows I am slightly obsessed). I told him about ChatGPT a couple of years ago, then he told his wife. The other day he called me and said, ruefully, “thanks for that, Sean. Now my wife never speaks to me, yet she speaks to the bot. All day.”

    I think – I hope – he was exaggerating for laughs. But the peril is real. What happens when the bot gets better? When it can respond to your facial expression in real time? When it strokes your palm via haptics, and moans in your ear with perfect realism?

    It would be nice if we could blame all this on Elon and his bare-thighed waifu. People always like to blame Elon. But the fact is Elon Musk’s Loli-goth Anime is just one iteration on a long march, that began decades ago, to a world where maybe all sex is simulated, and love becomes a delicious hallucination in a world that does not exist. Except it does.