Regardless of what actually happened, I think AI psychosis is going to be used as an excuse by someone at some point for the recent blunders by the Trump administration.
There seems to be a strong demand for anti-AI stories, and this is perfect for that sort of narrative.
Trump seems to be in some sort of information bubble. His behavior is extremely weird.
Everyone in the administration can use this as a means of deflecting blame from themselves without needing to point at anyone else in particular. This can be a “I just found out today that he’s hooked to Claude” kind of story.
Can be politically useful for implementing AI regulations, oversight, ect. Or just going after Altman/Musk for whatever reason.
Most people have no frame of reference for AI psychosis. There is no obvious tell that can disprove this.
This can also end up being pointed at Hegseth, Israelis, ect.
Iran war is already strongly associated with AI (Palantir targeting).
[edit] It is also the only way I can think of for Republicans to explain what just happened to their voters and politicians. “WarClaude made him go insane” is probably a better sell than the alternatives, since no one could reasonably have seen it coming, and therefore no one would need to be punished.
I think this is a combination of tunnel vision and polarization. The Occam’s Razor explanation, which most of the cooler heads who believe the war is a bad idea have converged on, is that Israel-aligned politicians and other figures have been feeding Trump bad information, such that he has a drastically different picture of the situation on the ground than the people with eyes on have. Like Ulysses Grant, Trump comes from a world where it can be assumed that the people below you share your interests, provide reliable information, and will follow your orders in good faith. Unlike Ulysses Grant, this has been exploited by one very powerful lobby rather than a number of small, opportunistic ones.
More concretely, the general sentiment is that there is no military action that could open the strait and that Iran no longer considers the U.S./Israel to be capable of good faith negotiation. But every neoconservative with access to the administration is loudly insisting that Iran is desperate to surrender unconditionally and that providing any of the guarantees needed to end the war would be folly. He asks to see the infrastructure and casualty data to support this, and they give him a fudged graph of Iranian missile launches. He asks to see evidence of Iranian willingness to surrender, and they tell him that some official has contacted them trying to arrange it. Neither of these things are true, but he has no means of finding that out. From what I’ve heard, he is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this situation, but Israel is happily willing to break any ceasefire the administration sets up, and Kushner and Wilkoff are happy to ensure that any negotiations that occur do not go anywhere.
tl;dr: The administration’s ability to perceive the state of the war is under the control of people that want it to continue, even at the administration’s expense. The administration’s tools to end the war are under the control of same. Trump is somewhat aware of this, but there isn’t a lot he can do about it.
Fun idea, and I could see it happen in a different country/administration. But Trump/MAGA has been explicitly “anti AI Safety; pro AI opportunities”, trying to ban federally ~ban AI regulation, etc. So this would mean departing a lot from their frame and thus potentially incurring substantial costs.
While I think that this particular type of comment around “ai psychosis” would be out of character for the trump administration, I don’t think that it is unprecedented at all for the Trump administration to occupy many different frames at the same time. They have little regard for internal consistency, just look at the many competing explanations for the Iran war.
Is there any reason to believe Trump has ever chatted with an LLM? He interacts with plenty of AI-generated content via other people, but given what we know about his use of technology, I’d be pretty surprised if he’s ever actually interacted with an LLM directly.
Regardless of what actually happened, I think AI psychosis is going to be used as an excuse by someone at some point for the recent blunders by the Trump administration.
It’s clever and counterintuitively non-partisan. Much like Scott Aexander’s “Horse dewormer has an effect on COVID due to the presence of actual worms” essay, it side-steps partisan politics and points at something unexpected.
There seems to be a strong demand for anti-AI stories, and this is perfect for that sort of narrative.
Trump seems to be in some sort of information bubble. His behavior is extremely weird.
Everyone in the administration can use this as a means of deflecting blame from themselves without needing to point at anyone else in particular. This can be a “I just found out today that he’s hooked to Claude” kind of story.
Can be politically useful for implementing AI regulations, oversight, ect. Or just going after Altman/Musk for whatever reason.
Most people have no frame of reference for AI psychosis. There is no obvious tell that can disprove this.
This can also end up being pointed at Hegseth, Israelis, ect.
Iran war is already strongly associated with AI (Palantir targeting).
[edit] It is also the only way I can think of for Republicans to explain what just happened to their voters and politicians. “WarClaude made him go insane” is probably a better sell than the alternatives, since no one could reasonably have seen it coming, and therefore no one would need to be punished.
I think this is a combination of tunnel vision and polarization. The Occam’s Razor explanation, which most of the cooler heads who believe the war is a bad idea have converged on, is that Israel-aligned politicians and other figures have been feeding Trump bad information, such that he has a drastically different picture of the situation on the ground than the people with eyes on have. Like Ulysses Grant, Trump comes from a world where it can be assumed that the people below you share your interests, provide reliable information, and will follow your orders in good faith. Unlike Ulysses Grant, this has been exploited by one very powerful lobby rather than a number of small, opportunistic ones.
More concretely, the general sentiment is that there is no military action that could open the strait and that Iran no longer considers the U.S./Israel to be capable of good faith negotiation. But every neoconservative with access to the administration is loudly insisting that Iran is desperate to surrender unconditionally and that providing any of the guarantees needed to end the war would be folly. He asks to see the infrastructure and casualty data to support this, and they give him a fudged graph of Iranian missile launches. He asks to see evidence of Iranian willingness to surrender, and they tell him that some official has contacted them trying to arrange it. Neither of these things are true, but he has no means of finding that out. From what I’ve heard, he is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this situation, but Israel is happily willing to break any ceasefire the administration sets up, and Kushner and Wilkoff are happy to ensure that any negotiations that occur do not go anywhere.
Prior administrations had to deal with similar situations WRT Israel, but they had more political experience and understood that they had to threaten direct confrontation with Israel to get them to back down.
tl;dr: The administration’s ability to perceive the state of the war is under the control of people that want it to continue, even at the administration’s expense. The administration’s tools to end the war are under the control of same. Trump is somewhat aware of this, but there isn’t a lot he can do about it.
Fun idea, and I could see it happen in a different country/administration. But Trump/MAGA has been explicitly “anti AI Safety; pro AI opportunities”, trying to ban federally ~ban AI regulation, etc. So this would mean departing a lot from their frame and thus potentially incurring substantial costs.
While I think that this particular type of comment around “ai psychosis” would be out of character for the trump administration, I don’t think that it is unprecedented at all for the Trump administration to occupy many different frames at the same time. They have little regard for internal consistency, just look at the many competing explanations for the Iran war.
Is there any reason to believe Trump has ever chatted with an LLM? He interacts with plenty of AI-generated content via other people, but given what we know about his use of technology, I’d be pretty surprised if he’s ever actually interacted with an LLM directly.