Daily Archives: 8 September 2026

“AI is Satanic”

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That’s what the headline on the WSJ article claims. The headline misleads, as the article itself goes on to say.

Experts call…tendency of machines to excessively agree with and flatter their users AI sycophancy. Vance chose spiritual terms. “I think that’s kind of satanic.”

Certain behaviors of AI can be satanic; that does not make AI satanic.

The larger issue for me, though, is what AI gets used for. It certainly can be abusive—or satanic, in the extreme—if it’s used wrongly, and misusing it can be done subtly enough that the user might not recognize the abuse. Vice President JD Vance (R) cited a friend who used an AI package for marital advice and got back validation of his own selfishness. Children have used AI packages for advice and have been led to suicide.

Those are uses of the tool, though. AI also has been used to good effect for business moves, to identify patterns in complex and/or noisy data, to point ways toward disease controlling chemistry.

 

Even where AI sycophancy leads to failure, even egregious failure, though, it’s not that AI is misbehaved or satanic, it’s that its human programmers have programmed the sycophancy into it through flawed programming and flawed testing.

AI in itself is just another tool, neither good nor bad intrinsically. It’s necessary to discriminate between the tool and what the tool gets used for. Build the data centers, and get training in how to use it. Then take care in its use, just as is necessary for any other tool, whether a power saw or a firearm.

Further Misapprehension

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Or continued misapprehension. In his article on time and the Hormuz Strait blockades, Yaroslav Trofimov had this remark, citing a senior Gulf Arab official. The official was talking about who had the more time to outlast the other’s blockade.

…the clock is ticking more for the Iranians because they are under enormous economic strain.

The underlying, and greater, question is this: which Iranians are under enormous economic strain? Certainly, the Iranian people are, with a currency that’s worthless outside of Iran, extremely high and rapidly rising inflation, limited and declining amounts of gasoline, limited and declining amounts of food, and on and on.

It’s just as certain, though, that the Iranians reigning over the country don’t care about any of that. They care only about their personal power, encouraging their satraps—Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis—to continue their terror attacks against Israel, and doing whatever they need to do to effect the destruction of Israel and sever damage to, if not destruction of, the US. These persons are feeling no economic strain whatsoever.

And this:

The country’s civilian leaders, such as President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who led the June negotiations with the US, have called for a return to the talks, pointing to the deteriorating state of the Iranian economy.

That’s just empty rhetoric. Just as in those prior talks, and just as their predecessors did in prior years of talks, all these persons would do in any further talks is yap, delay, and stall. They will propose nothing serious.

The only way, the fastest way, also, to put a favorable end (for the world, not just for the US) to the current conflict is to conduct a full scale, persistent kinetic and cyber attack on Iran’s military facilities and military-supporting factories and on all of Iran’s nuclear weapons-related sites, and to kill those persons reigning over Iran, both civilian and IRGC.

If Iran’s persons in charge become ready for serious talks, their decision-makers can be given safe passage to the talks location while the attacks continue unabated.