The experiment of social media was: build a virtual room, let everybody in, reward the people who scream that loudest, and then see what happens. The experiment of AI seems to be: build an interlocutor with specific ideology and élan, scale it infinitely across the Internet, and see what happens.

What is the social cost of scaling a technology to millions of people who trust it for the most important life questions, if that technology lacks the critical insight to help a user who doesn’t know how to help themselves?

What AI is not so good at telling us is when we’re asking the wrong questions in the first place.

he study “Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models” (published 2023; updated 2025) found that both human evaluators and preference models can “prefer convincingly-written sycophantic responses over correct ones.” In other words, the more chatbots are designed to appeal to people, the more they specialize in telling people exactly what... See more

Good friends tell you when you’re nuts. AI so often just tells you, “You’re so right. Wow. That sounds so hard.”