John Herrman
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jwherrman.bsky.social
John Herrman
@jwherrman.bsky.social
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posting about posts at new york magazine. have me on your podcast!
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Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
Wrote about an obvious and yet profoundly underappreciated aspect of the AI boom: its total narrative capture by Elon Musk's X nymag.com/intelligence...
The reality of the AI industry is far larger than a subculture on X with hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into physical infrastructure, reshaping jobs, and deploying into products used by billions of people. But that makes X's capture of the AI conversation all the more notable. Much as Twitter long ago captured, amplified, and distorted elite conversation in media, in sports, in parts of finance, in left politics, and more recently in right politics, the world's understanding of what's going on in Silicon Valley right now - the hype and the doom and the bubble and the progress - is first processed through the strange culture and incentives of X, which is now owned by estranged OpenAI co-founder, Google antagonist, and xAI founder Elon Musk. It has been merged into xAI, where the in-house chatbot occasionally confuses itself with Hitler. When the history of this period in tech is eventually written, it will be composed of, among other things, a whole lot of threads and replies from blue checks on X. Then, of course, there's the Musk factor. The fact of his ownership creates obvious risks for all of his competitors, who rely on his platform to supply the vibes they need to help keep their companies, and the AI boom in general, going. It's worth remembering that, back before he decided to purchase it and let it drive him nuts, Twitter was, to Musk, a platform with clear functional utility, a social network that helped make him wildly famous and use that fame to convince thousands of retail traders to buy into Tesla, the company that made him the richest man in the world. Even if we assume, against all reason, that Musk won't leverage this unusual sort of power over all the competitors gathered on his platform, X's influence over them and how they're seen by the rest of the world is undeniable. Along with "AI Twitter," some of the other communities thriving on Musk era X include MAGA guys and crypto guys, meaning that the background vibe of the primary gathering place for the industry that's trying to remake the world is quite a bit more conservative and mercenary than it otherwise might have been, and while the primary factor in the public's deep skepticism of where Al is going is clearly fear about labor, association with polarizing Muskian politics probably doesn't help assuage ambient fears about job loss and surveillance. (One important consequence of having the AI elite gathered on X is that their media diets are now substantially made up of one another's posts, effusive and dismissive responses to their oren posts, and standard "For You" page Musk-era algo-slop. It's hard to overstate how thoroughly their information diets are influenced by their timelines, and you can get a pretty good idea of what those look like by jacking into AI Twitter yourself.)
January 5, 2026 at 2:56 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
tedunderwood.com
This is an important negative reality. It's also sustained by industry incentives—and the thing most likely to break it is a big company or two deciding it's bad business to network on a competitor's site.

I am a fan of banning mean bsky account FlameTroll420, but that's not the tipping point.
jwherrman.bsky.social John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 13h
Wrote about an obvious and yet profoundly underappreciated aspect of the AI boom: its total narrative capture by Elon Musk's X nymag.com/intelligence...
The reality of the AI industry is far larger than a subculture on X with hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into physical infrastructure, reshaping jobs, and deploying into products used by billions of people. But that makes X's capture of the AI conversation all the more notable. Much as Twitter long ago captured, amplified, and distorted elite conversation in media, in sports, in parts of finance, in left politics, and more recently in right politics, the world's understanding of what's going on in Silicon Valley right now - the hype and the doom and the bubble and the progress - is first processed through the strange culture and incentives of X, which is now owned by estranged OpenAI co-founder, Google antagonist, and xAI founder Elon Musk. It has been merged into xAI, where the in-house chatbot occasionally confuses itself with Hitler. When the history of this period in tech is eventually written, it will be composed of, among other things, a whole lot of threads and replies from blue checks on X. Then, of course, there's the Musk factor. The fact of his ownership creates obvious risks for all of his competitors, who rely on his platform to supply the vibes they need to help keep their companies, and the AI boom in general, going. It's worth remembering that, back before he decided to purchase it and let it drive him nuts, Twitter was, to Musk, a platform with clear functional utility, a social network that helped make him wildly famous and use that fame to convince thousands of retail traders to buy into Tesla, the company that made him the richest man in the world. Even if we assume, against all reason, that Musk won't leverage this unusual sort of power over all the competitors gathered on his platform, X's influence over them and how they're seen by the rest of the world is undeniable. Along with "AI Twitter," some of the other communities thriving on Musk era X include MAGA guys and crypto guys, meaning that the background vibe of the primary gathering place for the industry that's trying to remake the world is quite a bit more conservative and mercenary than it otherwise might have been, and while the primary factor in the public's deep skepticism of where Al is going is clearly fear about labor, association with polarizing Muskian politics probably doesn't help assuage ambient fears about job loss and surveillance. (One important consequence of having the AI elite gathered on X is that their media diets are now substantially made up of one another's posts, effusive and dismissive responses to their oren posts, and standard "For You" page Musk-era algo-slop. It's hard to overstate how thoroughly their information diets are influenced by their timelines, and you can get a pretty good idea of what those look like by jacking into AI Twitter yourself.)
January 5, 2026 at 8:18 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
Wrote about an obvious and yet profoundly underappreciated aspect of the AI boom: its total narrative capture by Elon Musk's X nymag.com/intelligence...
The reality of the AI industry is far larger than a subculture on X with hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into physical infrastructure, reshaping jobs, and deploying into products used by billions of people. But that makes X's capture of the AI conversation all the more notable. Much as Twitter long ago captured, amplified, and distorted elite conversation in media, in sports, in parts of finance, in left politics, and more recently in right politics, the world's understanding of what's going on in Silicon Valley right now - the hype and the doom and the bubble and the progress - is first processed through the strange culture and incentives of X, which is now owned by estranged OpenAI co-founder, Google antagonist, and xAI founder Elon Musk. It has been merged into xAI, where the in-house chatbot occasionally confuses itself with Hitler. When the history of this period in tech is eventually written, it will be composed of, among other things, a whole lot of threads and replies from blue checks on X. Then, of course, there's the Musk factor. The fact of his ownership creates obvious risks for all of his competitors, who rely on his platform to supply the vibes they need to help keep their companies, and the AI boom in general, going. It's worth remembering that, back before he decided to purchase it and let it drive him nuts, Twitter was, to Musk, a platform with clear functional utility, a social network that helped make him wildly famous and use that fame to convince thousands of retail traders to buy into Tesla, the company that made him the richest man in the world. Even if we assume, against all reason, that Musk won't leverage this unusual sort of power over all the competitors gathered on his platform, X's influence over them and how they're seen by the rest of the world is undeniable. Along with "AI Twitter," some of the other communities thriving on Musk era X include MAGA guys and crypto guys, meaning that the background vibe of the primary gathering place for the industry that's trying to remake the world is quite a bit more conservative and mercenary than it otherwise might have been, and while the primary factor in the public's deep skepticism of where Al is going is clearly fear about labor, association with polarizing Muskian politics probably doesn't help assuage ambient fears about job loss and surveillance. (One important consequence of having the AI elite gathered on X is that their media diets are now substantially made up of one another's posts, effusive and dismissive responses to their oren posts, and standard "For You" page Musk-era algo-slop. It's hard to overstate how thoroughly their information diets are influenced by their timelines, and you can get a pretty good idea of what those look like by jacking into AI Twitter yourself.)
January 5, 2026 at 2:56 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
I don't love making broad predictions but I feel this one in my bones
It's interesting - I'II stop short of saying fun - to think about how far all this might go, and what that comprehensively "financialized" information environment would be like to live in. I dont think that you need to move very far in that direction before widespread participation in prediction markets starts to meaningfully influence how people engage with the democratic process. To make that more specific, in the spirit of this package: If enough people see their responsibility during an election as guessing who'll win, it seems reasonable to expect that they II start to vote differently, as will a public increasingly convinced of and/or confused about the value of aggregated prediction. And to put a human face on it: Have you spent much time talking politics with young traders? Or consuming their favorite sources of news? Or even just eavesdropping on their bubble on X? Living and working in service and fear of prediction does some specific and fascinating things to your view of the world! (And that's not even getting into the insider-ish trading-ish possibilities, which | suppose a prediction market true believer would tell you are an information-revealing feature, not a bug.) Prediction markets pitch themselves as a corrective for the media and a replacement for punditry, toward which their proponents usefully and I think honestly perform contempt - hating the media is good marketing, making fun of the media is good politics, and trying to replace it is good business. (Kalshi and Polymarket are both getting into media in their own ways, beyond just partnerships.) But I'm not sure anyone, including blackpilled MAGA-curious founders, has less respect for the profession than political media executives and our most sociopathic pundits, who'll be happier than anyone to have an additional layer of game-like abstraction between their brains and the processes that determine, for example, who lives and dies in America.
December 11, 2025 at 3:30 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
this is so grimy and funny (caption left, nymag insta right)
December 10, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
I'm deeply skeptical of mainstream disinformation discourse, and it's pretty clear that most of the foreign X accounts are just engagment farming. But to the extent they're politically important, it's to X's gathered elites, not the masses nymag.com/intelligence...
X is where the MAGA movement talks to itself in public and where its leading lights cultivate their online personas. They regularly drive themselves insane — or, at least, further to the right. Thinking in terms of a 2016-ish threat model, the risks associated with a huge number of popular political accounts masquerading as Americans on X lay less with the voting public than with the new set of elites that stew in the platform's memes all day, interpreting and internalizing what they see there as evidence of broad support or new political consensus. If we imagine this as proof of a sort of organized scheme or foreign-influence operation, in other words, its target wouldn't be the median American lurker. It would be J.D. Vance, a man who frequently talks, and presumably thinks, in posts.
November 26, 2025 at 4:42 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
pbump.com
Fitting, since the circa 2016 Russian Facebook activity got orders of magnitude more traction in the Discourse than it did among regular people.
jwherrman.bsky.social John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · Nov 26
I'm deeply skeptical of mainstream disinformation discourse, and it's pretty clear that most of the foreign X accounts are just engagment farming. But to the extent they're politically important, it's to X's gathered elites, not the masses nymag.com/intelligence...
X is where the MAGA movement talks to itself in public and where its leading lights cultivate their online personas. They regularly drive themselves insane — or, at least, further to the right. Thinking in terms of a 2016-ish threat model, the risks associated with a huge number of popular political accounts masquerading as Americans on X lay less with the voting public than with the new set of elites that stew in the platform's memes all day, interpreting and internalizing what they see there as evidence of broad support or new political consensus. If we imagine this as proof of a sort of organized scheme or foreign-influence operation, in other words, its target wouldn't be the median American lurker. It would be J.D. Vance, a man who frequently talks, and presumably thinks, in posts.
November 26, 2025 at 4:50 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
I'm deeply skeptical of mainstream disinformation discourse, and it's pretty clear that most of the foreign X accounts are just engagment farming. But to the extent they're politically important, it's to X's gathered elites, not the masses nymag.com/intelligence...
X is where the MAGA movement talks to itself in public and where its leading lights cultivate their online personas. They regularly drive themselves insane — or, at least, further to the right. Thinking in terms of a 2016-ish threat model, the risks associated with a huge number of popular political accounts masquerading as Americans on X lay less with the voting public than with the new set of elites that stew in the platform's memes all day, interpreting and internalizing what they see there as evidence of broad support or new political consensus. If we imagine this as proof of a sort of organized scheme or foreign-influence operation, in other words, its target wouldn't be the median American lurker. It would be J.D. Vance, a man who frequently talks, and presumably thinks, in posts.
November 26, 2025 at 4:42 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
Provocative title here from @rufusrock.bsky.social but it's hard to disagree on this point 1/ phttps://asimovaddendum.substack.com/p/are-llms-the-best-that-they-will?r=3f5ape&triedRedirect=true
Yet the lack of profits at these Al companies has an upside for the user - at least for now. Searching for things like candles on ChatGPT is so unusually pleasant at the moment - particularly compared to Amazon and Google - precisely because its search function has not yet been warped by the pressure to generate the kind of profits needed to recoup past losses. However, if these Al tools are to survive financially, the economic reality is that they will have to change.
November 25, 2025 at 5:27 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
on the load-bearing AI bubble, and the subtle shift from warnings about x-risk to warnings about good old financial risk nymag.com/intelligence...
That insiders seem to agree that we could be in a massive bubble is, counterintuitively, not very useful: Whether or not they mean it, and whether or not they re right, their incentives as leaders of megascale start-ups and public tech companies are such that raising, spending, and committing as much money as possible for as long as possible is probably the rational, self-interested choice either way. Anxious, skeptical, or merely satisfied investors looking for excuses to pull back or harvest gains don't have to look hard, and there's evidence some are; before its earnings report, Peter Thiel's investment firm unloaded its position in Nvidia, and Softbank cashed out of the chip-maker at around the same time. Similarly, OpenAI's ability to send public companies' stocks soaring by announcing massive "commitments" seems to be fading - Oracle's recent $300 billion valuation bump, based on some shockingly optimistic guidance it offered investors in September, has since gone negative. Huang has two typical responses to all this. One speaks for itself: Look at all those GPUs we're selling. The other is more direct. "There's been a lot of talk about an Al bubble. From our vantage point," he said after earnings, "we see something very different." In other words: No, it's not. The "virtuous cycle" is just beginning, and the accelerating potential of the most versatile technology the world has ever seen will one day expose complaints about incremental model updates and hand-wringing about data-center deals as shortsighted and insignificant. Huang continues to be able to speak with authority and tell a story that, for investors, still has juice. For everyone else, though, neither side of this wildly polarized, high-stakes bet sounds ideal. If this really is a bubble, and it deflates even a little, it could send the American economy into a serious slump, with consequences for almost everyone, getting rid of plenty of jobs the old-fashioned way. If it doesn't - and Huang's sanitized visions of mass automation rapidly start to spread across the economy, justifying all that CapEx and all those strange deals and then some - well, aren't we getting laid off anyway?
November 21, 2025 at 4:11 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
on the load-bearing AI bubble, and the subtle shift from warnings about x-risk to warnings about good old financial risk nymag.com/intelligence...
That insiders seem to agree that we could be in a massive bubble is, counterintuitively, not very useful: Whether or not they mean it, and whether or not they re right, their incentives as leaders of megascale start-ups and public tech companies are such that raising, spending, and committing as much money as possible for as long as possible is probably the rational, self-interested choice either way. Anxious, skeptical, or merely satisfied investors looking for excuses to pull back or harvest gains don't have to look hard, and there's evidence some are; before its earnings report, Peter Thiel's investment firm unloaded its position in Nvidia, and Softbank cashed out of the chip-maker at around the same time. Similarly, OpenAI's ability to send public companies' stocks soaring by announcing massive "commitments" seems to be fading - Oracle's recent $300 billion valuation bump, based on some shockingly optimistic guidance it offered investors in September, has since gone negative. Huang has two typical responses to all this. One speaks for itself: Look at all those GPUs we're selling. The other is more direct. "There's been a lot of talk about an Al bubble. From our vantage point," he said after earnings, "we see something very different." In other words: No, it's not. The "virtuous cycle" is just beginning, and the accelerating potential of the most versatile technology the world has ever seen will one day expose complaints about incremental model updates and hand-wringing about data-center deals as shortsighted and insignificant. Huang continues to be able to speak with authority and tell a story that, for investors, still has juice. For everyone else, though, neither side of this wildly polarized, high-stakes bet sounds ideal. If this really is a bubble, and it deflates even a little, it could send the American economy into a serious slump, with consequences for almost everyone, getting rid of plenty of jobs the old-fashioned way. If it doesn't - and Huang's sanitized visions of mass automation rapidly start to spread across the economy, justifying all that CapEx and all those strange deals and then some - well, aren't we getting laid off anyway?
November 21, 2025 at 4:11 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
if you're a maximally public figure you have to buy/build a level of sycophancy that regular/outside-the-training-data/minimal-online-presence LLM users can basically already access for free
November 19, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
lopatto.bsky.social
he didn't miss all of them
a screen shot from MIT's report on Jeffrey Epstein's donations. Highlighted is the line "The earliest gift was $100,000 given in 2002 to support the research of the late Professor Marvin Minsky."
November 18, 2025 at 10:14 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
jeff epstein and so many ai guys just barely missed each other
November 18, 2025 at 10:12 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
indeed, this is the one useful thing about Grok and Grokipedia nymag.com/intelligence...
November 17, 2025 at 9:39 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
not too hard to imagine a comprehensively gambling-obsessed political media, maybe soon nymag.com/intelligence...
Max Read notes that these companies are posting in a familiar style. "If you still spend time on X.com, you will recognize here precisely the same clipped, decontextualized, link-free, moronically breathless style of tweeting deployed by 'financial news for low-trust illiterates' accounts like Unusual Whales or ZeroHedge (or, for that matter, in a slightly different arena, PopCrave)," he writes. To be slightly more generous about it, accounts like this have, on a platform where outside links barely exist, mainstream media brands are no longer visible, and commentary crowds out timely updates, stepped in to fill a market need, as strange and distorted as it may be. As Read points out, Kalshi and Polymarket are also speaking the language of their most devoted users - "epistemically captured right-wing hobbyist gamblers and speculators — and meeting them where they are, on X, which is another way of saying it's just good marketing. But, in the spirit of prediction, I think material like this will soon be more than a sideshow and already sketches an outline of a new, betting-centric political media. Gambling took over sports coverage, after all. Why won't it take over everything else? If more people put more money into markets like Kalshi, it's easy enough to imagine how a sportslike media transformation might unfold through sponsorships, normalization in existing media, constant metacoverage of prediction odds, and content produced by the prediction platforms themselves. Aside from its posting habits, Polymarket already has a podcast; on the websites of shrinking newspapers around the country, you can already find aggregated articles sharing the current betting odds for the 2028 election. (J.D. Vance +225, Gavin Newsom +350, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez +900 in case you were curious and know what that means.) Why wouldn't fast-growing companies in a wildly lucrative but competitive industry hire or sponsor some influencers to make some content, draw some attention, and convert some customers? Why shouldn't they convene, say, a Jubilee in which participants argue about their bets on polities rather than politics as such? I've got $5,000 on J.D. Vance 2028. Change my mind.
November 13, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
rusty.todayintabs.com
This is the most cursed idea I’ve ever seen and it’s immediately obvious that this is where we’re headed
jwherrman.bsky.social John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · Nov 13
not too hard to imagine a comprehensively gambling-obsessed political media, maybe soon nymag.com/intelligence...
Max Read notes that these companies are posting in a familiar style. "If you still spend time on X.com, you will recognize here precisely the same clipped, decontextualized, link-free, moronically breathless style of tweeting deployed by 'financial news for low-trust illiterates' accounts like Unusual Whales or ZeroHedge (or, for that matter, in a slightly different arena, PopCrave)," he writes. To be slightly more generous about it, accounts like this have, on a platform where outside links barely exist, mainstream media brands are no longer visible, and commentary crowds out timely updates, stepped in to fill a market need, as strange and distorted as it may be. As Read points out, Kalshi and Polymarket are also speaking the language of their most devoted users - "epistemically captured right-wing hobbyist gamblers and speculators — and meeting them where they are, on X, which is another way of saying it's just good marketing. But, in the spirit of prediction, I think material like this will soon be more than a sideshow and already sketches an outline of a new, betting-centric political media. Gambling took over sports coverage, after all. Why won't it take over everything else? If more people put more money into markets like Kalshi, it's easy enough to imagine how a sportslike media transformation might unfold through sponsorships, normalization in existing media, constant metacoverage of prediction odds, and content produced by the prediction platforms themselves. Aside from its posting habits, Polymarket already has a podcast; on the websites of shrinking newspapers around the country, you can already find aggregated articles sharing the current betting odds for the 2028 election. (J.D. Vance +225, Gavin Newsom +350, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez +900 in case you were curious and know what that means.) Why wouldn't fast-growing companies in a wildly lucrative but competitive industry hire or sponsor some influencers to make some content, draw some attention, and convert some customers? Why shouldn't they convene, say, a Jubilee in which participants argue about their bets on polities rather than politics as such? I've got $5,000 on J.D. Vance 2028. Change my mind.
November 13, 2025 at 5:21 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
not too hard to imagine a comprehensively gambling-obsessed political media, maybe soon nymag.com/intelligence...
Max Read notes that these companies are posting in a familiar style. "If you still spend time on X.com, you will recognize here precisely the same clipped, decontextualized, link-free, moronically breathless style of tweeting deployed by 'financial news for low-trust illiterates' accounts like Unusual Whales or ZeroHedge (or, for that matter, in a slightly different arena, PopCrave)," he writes. To be slightly more generous about it, accounts like this have, on a platform where outside links barely exist, mainstream media brands are no longer visible, and commentary crowds out timely updates, stepped in to fill a market need, as strange and distorted as it may be. As Read points out, Kalshi and Polymarket are also speaking the language of their most devoted users - "epistemically captured right-wing hobbyist gamblers and speculators — and meeting them where they are, on X, which is another way of saying it's just good marketing. But, in the spirit of prediction, I think material like this will soon be more than a sideshow and already sketches an outline of a new, betting-centric political media. Gambling took over sports coverage, after all. Why won't it take over everything else? If more people put more money into markets like Kalshi, it's easy enough to imagine how a sportslike media transformation might unfold through sponsorships, normalization in existing media, constant metacoverage of prediction odds, and content produced by the prediction platforms themselves. Aside from its posting habits, Polymarket already has a podcast; on the websites of shrinking newspapers around the country, you can already find aggregated articles sharing the current betting odds for the 2028 election. (J.D. Vance +225, Gavin Newsom +350, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez +900 in case you were curious and know what that means.) Why wouldn't fast-growing companies in a wildly lucrative but competitive industry hire or sponsor some influencers to make some content, draw some attention, and convert some customers? Why shouldn't they convene, say, a Jubilee in which participants argue about their bets on polities rather than politics as such? I've got $5,000 on J.D. Vance 2028. Change my mind.
November 13, 2025 at 5:17 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
dying at the AI options on the new Epstein files
November 12, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
In one specific way, Grok might be the most honest and transparent AI project out there nymag.com/intelligence...
As absurd and undignified as Grokipedia's founder-centric origin story may be — How good could Wikipedia be if its page about me is so rude? — Elon Musk's attempt to remake his own information environment is instructive and, if not exactly candid, usefully transparent (or at least poorly concealed). You won't hear Musk joking about "his own fictionalized version of reality" in 2025 — now he prefers to speak in messianic terms about apocalyptic threats, no matter the subject. But Grokipedia, and Musk's AI projects in general, invite us to see LLMs as powerful and intrinsically biased ideological tools, which, whatever you make of Grok's example, they always are. We know an awful lot about what Elon Musk thinks about the world, and we know that he wants his own products to align with his greater project. In Grok and Grokipedia, we get to see clearly what it looks like when particular ideologies are intentionally encoded into AI products that are then deployed widely and to openly ideological ends. We also get to recognize how thoroughly familiar parts of the spectacle are, as chatbots rehash the same pitches to audiences, and invite many of the same obvious criticisms, as newspapers, TV channels, and social-media platforms before them — when Fox offered its "fair and balanced" alternative to other cable networks, Mark Zuckerberg claimed to be returning to his company's "free speech" roots, or the New York Times reminded us that the "truth" is hard, actually. Now, it's AI companies winking as they tell us to trust them, engaging in flattering marketing, and giving in to paternalistic temptations without much awareness of how their predecessors' decades of similar efforts helped lead the public to a state of profound institutional cynicism. As novel and versatile as LLM-based chatbots are, their relationship to the outside world is recognizably and deeply editorial, like a newspaper or, more recently, an algorithmically sorted-and-censored social network. (It's helpful to think of OpenAI's "bias evaluation" process, or Grokipedia's top-down reactionary political correctness, as less of a systemic audit than a straightforward edit.) What ChatGPT says about politics — or anything — is ultimately what the people who created it say it should say, or allow it to say; more specifically, human beings at OpenAI are deciding what neutral answers to those 500 prompts might look like and instructing their model to follow their lead. OpenAl's incoherent appeal to objective neutrality is an effort to avoid this perception and one that anyone who runs a major media outlet or social-media platform knows won't fool people for long. OpenAI would probably prefer not to be evaluated by these punishing and polarized standards, so, as many other organizations have tried before, it's claiming to exist outside them. On that task, I suspect ChatGPT will fail.
November 11, 2025 at 2:24 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
In one specific way, Grok might be the most honest and transparent AI project out there nymag.com/intelligence...
As absurd and undignified as Grokipedia's founder-centric origin story may be — How good could Wikipedia be if its page about me is so rude? — Elon Musk's attempt to remake his own information environment is instructive and, if not exactly candid, usefully transparent (or at least poorly concealed). You won't hear Musk joking about "his own fictionalized version of reality" in 2025 — now he prefers to speak in messianic terms about apocalyptic threats, no matter the subject. But Grokipedia, and Musk's AI projects in general, invite us to see LLMs as powerful and intrinsically biased ideological tools, which, whatever you make of Grok's example, they always are. We know an awful lot about what Elon Musk thinks about the world, and we know that he wants his own products to align with his greater project. In Grok and Grokipedia, we get to see clearly what it looks like when particular ideologies are intentionally encoded into AI products that are then deployed widely and to openly ideological ends. We also get to recognize how thoroughly familiar parts of the spectacle are, as chatbots rehash the same pitches to audiences, and invite many of the same obvious criticisms, as newspapers, TV channels, and social-media platforms before them — when Fox offered its "fair and balanced" alternative to other cable networks, Mark Zuckerberg claimed to be returning to his company's "free speech" roots, or the New York Times reminded us that the "truth" is hard, actually. Now, it's AI companies winking as they tell us to trust them, engaging in flattering marketing, and giving in to paternalistic temptations without much awareness of how their predecessors' decades of similar efforts helped lead the public to a state of profound institutional cynicism. As novel and versatile as LLM-based chatbots are, their relationship to the outside world is recognizably and deeply editorial, like a newspaper or, more recently, an algorithmically sorted-and-censored social network. (It's helpful to think of OpenAI's "bias evaluation" process, or Grokipedia's top-down reactionary political correctness, as less of a systemic audit than a straightforward edit.) What ChatGPT says about politics — or anything — is ultimately what the people who created it say it should say, or allow it to say; more specifically, human beings at OpenAI are deciding what neutral answers to those 500 prompts might look like and instructing their model to follow their lead. OpenAl's incoherent appeal to objective neutrality is an effort to avoid this perception and one that anyone who runs a major media outlet or social-media platform knows won't fool people for long. OpenAI would probably prefer not to be evaluated by these punishing and polarized standards, so, as many other organizations have tried before, it's claiming to exist outside them. On that task, I suspect ChatGPT will fail.
November 11, 2025 at 2:24 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
guy with no tools who doesn’t know how many cylinders his car has after ten minutes of ChatGPT: I can fix this

guy’s girlfriend after consulting her ChatGPT with memory mode enabled: This is exactly like when we went camping and there’s actually a term for this behavior
November 7, 2025 at 10:42 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
AI companies want to mediate the entire economy. Their competitors aren't happy about this nymag.com/intelligence...
This week, Amazon answered clearly in the affirmative, in the form of a lawsuit against Perplexity. The language is spicy: Amazon brings this action to stop Perplexity AI, Inc's ("Perplexity" or "Defendant" persistent, covert, and unauthorized access into Amazon's protected computer systems in violation of federal and California computer fraud and abuse statutes. This case is not about stifling innovation; it is about unauthorized access and trespass. It is about a company that, after repeated notice, chose to disguise an automated "agentic" browser as a human user, to evade Amazon's technological barriers, and to access private customer accounts without Amazon's permission. Fraud! Abuse! Trespass! Evasion! This is a threatening lawsuit — it later refers to Perplexity as an "intruder" — but it's also a useful window into Amazon's thinking on AI and where its business fits into a theoretical world where more people do more things with chatbots and agents. It might not be right to say the company is worried, exactly. But it's certainly clear about what it doesn't want to happen, which happens to be precisely what some AI companies clearly want. Most broadly, AI companies are hoping to end up in a situation where their products are the default interface for all sorts of things, and browser agents represent a small but aggressive move in that direction. A world where all purchases flow entirely through another company's interface, chatbot or otherwise, is something that Amazon would prefer to avoid, or at least have a say in, which is perhaps why the company's lawyers are talking about Perplexity as if it's built an automated ticket-scalping app, a sneaker-sniping bot, a data scraper, a data-exfiltration tool, or rip-off interface for its product catalogue. Earlier this week, Perplexity argued on its site: Amazon wants to block you from using your own AI assistant to shop on their platform ... Amazon should love this. Easier shopping means more transactions and happier customers. But Amazon doesn't care. They're more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers. Suggesting that "Amazon should love this" and then describing the ways that it might cause them to make less money is sort of funny, but between the lawsuit and Perplexity's response we can get a pretty clear sense of what's going on here: an attempt by Amazon to stop a marginal player from setting a precedent it doesn't want, and a clear signal to bigger ones — OpenAI, Google, and other firms Amazon already competes and partners with - that, if they want their tools to touch Amazon, they'll have to do it on Amazon's terms. This is a sort of conflict we can expect to see a lot of, and soon.
November 7, 2025 at 3:34 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
AI companies want to mediate the entire economy. Their competitors aren't happy about this nymag.com/intelligence...
This week, Amazon answered clearly in the affirmative, in the form of a lawsuit against Perplexity. The language is spicy: Amazon brings this action to stop Perplexity AI, Inc's ("Perplexity" or "Defendant" persistent, covert, and unauthorized access into Amazon's protected computer systems in violation of federal and California computer fraud and abuse statutes. This case is not about stifling innovation; it is about unauthorized access and trespass. It is about a company that, after repeated notice, chose to disguise an automated "agentic" browser as a human user, to evade Amazon's technological barriers, and to access private customer accounts without Amazon's permission. Fraud! Abuse! Trespass! Evasion! This is a threatening lawsuit — it later refers to Perplexity as an "intruder" — but it's also a useful window into Amazon's thinking on AI and where its business fits into a theoretical world where more people do more things with chatbots and agents. It might not be right to say the company is worried, exactly. But it's certainly clear about what it doesn't want to happen, which happens to be precisely what some AI companies clearly want. Most broadly, AI companies are hoping to end up in a situation where their products are the default interface for all sorts of things, and browser agents represent a small but aggressive move in that direction. A world where all purchases flow entirely through another company's interface, chatbot or otherwise, is something that Amazon would prefer to avoid, or at least have a say in, which is perhaps why the company's lawyers are talking about Perplexity as if it's built an automated ticket-scalping app, a sneaker-sniping bot, a data scraper, a data-exfiltration tool, or rip-off interface for its product catalogue. Earlier this week, Perplexity argued on its site: Amazon wants to block you from using your own AI assistant to shop on their platform ... Amazon should love this. Easier shopping means more transactions and happier customers. But Amazon doesn't care. They're more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers. Suggesting that "Amazon should love this" and then describing the ways that it might cause them to make less money is sort of funny, but between the lawsuit and Perplexity's response we can get a pretty clear sense of what's going on here: an attempt by Amazon to stop a marginal player from setting a precedent it doesn't want, and a clear signal to bigger ones — OpenAI, Google, and other firms Amazon already competes and partners with - that, if they want their tools to touch Amazon, they'll have to do it on Amazon's terms. This is a sort of conflict we can expect to see a lot of, and soon.
November 7, 2025 at 3:34 PM