Rich Whitehouse - Artificial Insanity

October 10, 2026 at 3:57 pm (CST)The idea that "artificial intelligence" is a poor moniker for the current frontier of generative AI models is indeed reasonable, but not because of the word "artificial". Frankly, including large language models under the umbrella is an insult to traditional AI. I mean, technically speaking, a video game from 1980 was likely to contain more logical branching points than a modern LLM's kernel, and was likely to be a lot more interesting to read. That's obviously a bit of an unfair comparison, but of course, so is the comparison between frontier "AI" and any long-standing definition of intelligence. Which brings us to why we're here: I want to provide a distillation of the real reasons we should all reject "AI" as it's being sold to us, and why we should despise the people selling it! This is going to be written from a very American perspective, because American economic and political dynamics are at the core of why American AI companies are drowning American people in bullshit. First, we need to be very clear on something that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI really don't like hearing in public discourse: frontier AI is still just a highly augmented stochastic parrot. A stochastic parrot with sufficient firepower can be a fearsome creature, and it can be useful in many different contexts. However, this parrot can't hope to emulate any serious form of consciousness, and therefore can't ever be capable of intelligent judgment. No matter how the data this parrot operates on is refined or how its selections are augmented, this parrot will always be prone to unpredictable and extremely undesirable token selections. You'd get better judgment from training an actual parrot, because it operates on a spectrum of data that the artificial parrot has no hope of operating on unless someone figures out how to make light move faster. This brings us to a big underlying problem with the way AI is being sold to us: it's being exaggerated to sound like way more than it is, and it's being sold to people/governments as something that will be capable of exceeding human "intelligence" in the near future when it's not capable of intelligence at all. Indeed, it's possible to exceed basic human memory and storage limitations through this implementation of AI, but it's already a physically demonstrable dead end when it comes to approaching the reasoning capacity of a human brain, or even an insect brain. There is no danger of a "rise of the machines" scenario with this technology, and while I feel a little bad for having to say it, people like Jacob Coxon are very much serving as "useful idiots" for American AI companies. They're taking away all the wrong messages and all the wrong dangers, and accidentally or otherwise, inflating the technology's perceived scope/importance by spreading a false narrative around its potential dangers. The only way this parrot can endanger humanity is if someone says "let's put this chaotic token predictor in a position where its output can kill people." Are people stupid enough to do that? Well, yes, of course they are. Are they stupid enough to do it at scale? Maybe, but the danger posed here is not by AI, it's by people, same as it's always been. The dangers posed by this technology on its present trajectory are best understood as simple accelerants for the existing dangers humans pose to themselves. Engineering a deadly new pathogen, for example, is already a danger - the barrier to entry is mostly in the hardware required, so being able to rapidly auto-generate and/or analyze variants isn't really adding much to the danger, it's just an assistive mechanism for state-level actors already engaging in this dangerous practice. Mind you, hardware availability/scalability in this realm stands a very good chance of indirectly resulting in our extinction in the not too distant future, but AI anywhere on its present trajectory is not likely to change that much. This paradigm is apparent in pretty much every category of "species-level" danger posed by the current generation of AI technology and its trajectory, it is at most an accelerant for an existing "misalignment" in the species. Our global socioeconomic order fails to align to our species-level needs and embraces a ruthless, sociopathic ethos which will almost certainly result in a large percentage of the global population dying horrible, premature deaths at some point in the not too distant future. AI has nothing to do with that, it's just helping speed it up a bit. AI is also helping authoritarian regimes inflict various forms of fascism in ways Nazi Germany only dreamed of, which poses a far more imminent danger to our collective quality of life than anything I've heard uttered in American media. So why are many of the very same sociopaths who are driving us toward climate destruction now suddenly so concerned about the "danger" posed by AI, and seemingly acting in defiance of their fiduciary duties to warn us that we must slow down development and seek regulation? Of course the reasons are entirely self-serving, which you should almost exclusively be able to determine from their history of narratives! They're combining this "threat to the species" narrative with a "we must stay ahead of China for the sake of our babies and all of Western Civilization" (this is incredibly ironic, I'll explain why in a bit) narrative, while milking the shit out of every perceived accomplishment (especially their highly publicized and highly distorted mathematical "victories"); it's important to understand that these narratives are directly linked to each other, in order to understand the reasons behind them. First you must realize that these companies have pulled off the greatest theft in all of human history. They've stolen every digitizable thing they can get their hands on with little to no respect for license or ownership (except where already forced by large-enough entities) under the assumption that they would be important enough for governments to save them from their crimes after the fact. They are completely dependent on the narrative that they've developed a revolutionary technology. Is a sufficiently-augmented parrot truly revolutionary? In some ways, in some industries, kind of. It's definitely going to make a lot of jobs more annoying and less satisfying in the coming decades. Will its economic gains offset its economic costs? Debatable, especially when you factor in the yet-to-be-realized (but predictable) consequences on future generations of labor. In fact, the current financial models behind these companies are unlikely to even be sustainable unless the companies succeed in their attempts at regulatory capture. Which brings up another important point. Another reason behind the desperate attempts to inflate the publicly perceived importance of AI is regulatory capture. These companies want to carve out as many exceptions for themselves as possible and quickly pull the ladder up. They can perform mass-theft, but no one else can! I also expect these companies to begin behind-the-scenes attempts to bury/hinder open-weight models, if that isn't already happening. Some of the dynamics at play here are very similar to the dynamics behind software engineering and Open Source which I outlined not too long ago, and in fact AI is also accelerating many of the existing harms in that ecosystem. Being open is only a good idea for a sociopathic entity (e.g. a corporation) for as long as it profits more by the devaluation of associated labor than it profits from the labor itself. By contrast, it's hilarious to see these companies internally panic about the practice of distillation; oh no, they are stealing from us, after we stole from everyone! For that reason, these companies have been very careful about how that panic is presented to the public, because they are very aware of the irony inherent in their objection to having their data "stolen". Now in order to protect their own interests (and I can't say it enough, those interests are all derived from the greatest theft in history) and to cover their own crimes, these companies have every incentive to try to reinvent copyright law. They have to contend with other big players in the American economy here, because some very powerful companies are very vested in existing copyright law. This is where you start to taste the irony in that "we must defeat China" narrative. These companies have already stepped all over individual property rights. For example, even some of the most permissive source code licenses tend to carry some loose terms and requirements, or simply request that authors receive attribution in derived works. All of that source code has been slurped up with no shits given. Every token from every given work and every weight that token influences (and every weight that weight influences, and so on) should reasonably be considered derivative of the work, and should be required to carry forth the terms of the license. By that logic, virtually every output from any of these LLM's is completely illegal.