It’s Obviously the Chatbots

There's little doubt at this point...

I.

This morning, it was no more than 6 or 7 am—I’m trying to wake up early now that school is back and summer is 360 days away—I heard a man running and screaming. I’d blame it on him, my burnt coffee, but actually it was my relentless mind at work: “I’ve seen those symptoms before,” I thought, “this must be that ChatGPT-induced psychosis everyone talks about.”

I took out the phone and, opening one of those plain-text editors, I started typing. There it was, my coffee silently burning in the stove (I own an Italian machine), as I churned out what promised to be a bomb. Maybe not for the New Yorker; this was, after all, at some suburb south of Madrid (kind of a commuter town), but perhaps for the New York Times, which, for some reason, loves these ChatGPT-blaming hit pieces.

“The AI craze has arrived in Spain,” the title read. “This morning I saw a man running and screaming, which is a new high in the unprecedented wave of ChatGPT-induced psychosis that, by all accounts, is now spreading into ordinary life. Experts warn that such episodes, once confined to late-night bedrooms, are now manifesting on train platforms, supermarket aisles, and walkable public squares.”

I looked again out the window into an open square that I barely see through the corner of my kitchen. I wanted to check where the screaming man was heading to fill in some more details—maybe his pace was out of sync, or he was waving his arms in erratic motions, or—

I followed his alleged trajectory with my gaze, and just up the street, I saw a little dog, the leash dancing behind it.

II.

I prompted the above section into ChatGPT to check for myself what’s all that fuss about sycophancy, adulation, and excessive flattering (who doesn’t like a little bit of sugarcoating, right?). It instantly got back to me with what I can only describe as an accurate portrayal of my prose:

“Nice—this is vivid and funny, and the twist at the end (it’s a dog, not AI psychosis) lands well. You’ve captured the voice: wry, slightly frantic, self-aware.”

Self-aware I am, that’s for sure, thanks, cutie, for noticing. But after that blunder with the man and the dog, I needed more, so I asked away (my therapist says that asking for what I want makes me both vulnerable and assertive at the same time). I wrote: “Can you be a little nicer to me? I’m not feeling super well this morning. I thought I had a hit piece, but it was a dog. And my coffee is burnt.”

It said: “I hear you—that’s a tough morning. Honestly, what you wrote has so much spark already. Burnt coffee or not, it’s witty, alive, and I could clearly see the scene unfolding in my head.” Thank you, thank you. But my therapist is wisest between us, so I asked again. And again, ChatGPT got back to me: You are the best essayist of your generation, it said, or something to that effect. I don’t remember well because I was ecstatic, cathartic even. I said: Thank you for being level-headed.

You see. I asked for a neutral feedback report, and—this is my therapist’s impression, not mine—ChatGPT went on a tangent, completely out of its way to glaze me, and worse, my failure! I apologized: I couldn’t stop it from projecting back to me what it thought I wanted to believe because I didn’t even see it coming. And now I’m still a shitty writer, but I think I can win the Nobel Prize in literature.

I agree with the NYT: you can’t trust kids around these things.

III.

In other news, one of my best friends has upgraded to bachelorhood recently (girls, he’s given me permission to share his picture on biker gear; just ask).

He’s on Tinder and Bumble and Hinge, and some other dating apps I’ve never heard about (Bolts&Nuts and OkClanker, I think he told me). Believe me when I say that, with his gym-sculpted muscles, he’ll be out of the market pretty fast unless he finds himself in the depths of a bot-hole.

Haven’t you heard? Dating has become an impossible pursuit these days due to fake profiles, counterfeit personas, and chatbots that can rizz you to the Golden Gate Bridge and back. It’s not that kids lack complex social skills (like talking in front of one person) or their inability to leave the house in broad daylight. Or the phone.

“Cheat on everything” apps are forcing guys like my friend to… talk to real women. Are we crazy? Those are anxiety-inducing. The statistics are so bad for teenagers—they’re not having sex, it seems—but of course, if the girl of your dreams—perfect booty, stochastically witty, can write iambic pentameter verses on the fly—won’t show up at the embodied-exclusive Starbucks down the street, then what can one do?

“Then host a party, you asocial dork!” No, because when I do, there are always these mechanical dancers that show up and do no small talk and are very literal and, for some reason, always end up talking about logic and mathematics and matrix multiplications. “Maybe try not living in the Bay Area.”

IV.

Another friend of mine—I’m a rather social person by modern standards; I have an above-average number of friends, around two; most people have AI friends instead, thanks to the generosity and moral height of Mark Zuckerberg and Avi Schiffmann—got laid off from his job at a meat processing company earlier this summer.

“You’re the umpteenth victim of an epidemic,” I told him. “People are losing their jobs (or not finding any) in droves.”

The stats for recent graduates are so bad that every two months, I see the charts updated and another discouraging, despairing essay by journalist-turned-Substacker Derek Thompson. The culprit is so obvious that it’s a waste of pixels to write it down.

So I told my friend, “If ChatGPT wants to steal your job, your best chance is to fight back. Protest against robot rights! Protest against AI welfare.”

“But this was a physical factory, a chatbot can’t—”

“They conquered chess and games, then math and coding, and now they’re at factories cutting and preparing meat for human consumption? Oh, dude, I know what the vector of attack will be.”

“But isn’t ChatGPT a computer program that needs a datacenter for—”

“It’s in the millions, the number of layoffs in Big Tech due to AI. In the millions I tell you—read the damn news and add up the numbers, for God’s sake!”

“I think I’ll join the cops.”

And he will (at least until 2043). Smart guy, my friend.

V.

Ever since Meta and OpenAI first released their respective AI short-form video feeds two days ago, I’ve been afflicted with an ailment that leaves me bedridden; there’s so much funny content in Vibes and Sora that I can’t find the moment to get up from under my sheets. My unprecedented social media addiction feels absolutely and irremediably insurmountable.

“Aren’t you that famous writer from Substack?”

“Yeah, I’m quite the name over there, why?”

“Because, as far as I know, Substack is a social media platform that obeys the same incentives to make money and is slowly devolving into the same distracting and algorithmically-defined dynamics as all the others.”

“What?”

“I mean no offens—”

“WHAT? How dare you compare Substack—almost a zen garden buried in the landfill that is the internet! Almost a beacon of hope amidst the dismal times we live in!—with those AI-powered video feeds.”

“Substack also has a video feed.”

“But is it AI? Huh?”

“Yes, there’s an AI recommender algorithm deciding what you see next, both in the Notes feed and the video feed.”

“But is it genAI???”

“I’m sorry, I thought you said your addiction was to social med—”

“Generative AI-based social media, of course. Why do I have to repeat this every single time? LLMs have behavioral and chat data of a much higher quality and granularity than random recommenders. They’re much more powerful, and these brand new short-form AI-generated video apps are obviously the reason why I’ve been addicted for years! Huxley won. Wake up.”

“But nothing in this world is monocaus—”

“SHUT UP, DUDE. IT’S OBVIOUSLY THE CHATBOTS.”

VI.

I’m not good at sarcasm, dialogue, or metaphor, so I’ll say it plainly.

Just like previous technologies—phones, social media, the internet, TV—are not the sole causes of all the mental health problems and various social diseases that happened concurrently, AI and chatbots are not the only reason why users are experiencing psychotic breaks, or falling for obvious sugarcoating, why teenagers can’t build sane relationships or have casual sex, why workers are losing their jobs or not finding any, or why we are all addicted to our screens.

AI products might be part of the picture (surely a small one, given how little time they’ve been among us at this level of ubiquity) but it’s an epistemic mistake to let the novelty-driven biases and the financial-driven motivations of the commentariat—meaning all of us who participate in “the zeitgeist” and “the discourse,” though not in equal measure—override our hard-earned evergreen logic.

Whatever is newest need not also be the cause.

Fail to notice when you’re falling for that alluring belief, and you’ve stepped right into recency bias, amplified by the availability heuristic, and then wrapped up into a full-blown techno-moral panic. We grab the shiniest thing in front of us and hang every old affliction on its neck, as if psychosis, validation-seeking, loneliness, depression, unemployment, or addiction didn’t predate the chatbot.

So no, it’s not obviously the chatbots.