one-shotted by artificial intelligence

things right now 035—week of 05.05.25

God in the Machine or AI-fueled spiritual fantasies

Last week, I said:

AI isn’t immiserating us. It’s giving us delusions of grandeur.

Just in time, Miles Klee from Rolling Stone published a piece corroborating my hypothesis. ChatGPT is convincing people they are prophets. See below:

Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAImodel “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.

What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”

“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.

Individuals won’t be the only ones suffering from AI-induced delusions of grandeur though…

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Was Indie Consulting ZIRP? or WPP’s Open

LinkedIn influencer Zoe Scaman has been sounding the alarm that the creative services industry is in the midst of a 'seismic shift'. Well another seismic shift. In recent memory, the consolidation of agency land into a Big Five oligopoly and Google slash Meta’s duopoly on digital ad dollars were both of similar significance. Will AI prove to be an even bigger gut punch to agency headcounts? Or more of the same?

Scaman writes:

The WPP build-out might take a while to kick into high gear, but once it does, make no mistake—roles like performance marketing, media planning, mid-tier copy, and creative [sic], they’ll be trimmed to the bone. We’re talking minimum viable investment. Optimised into near-oblivion.

She’s referring to WPP’s new Open platform. Scaman links to a rundown of the AI tool’s capabilities summarized by fellow LinkedIn influencer, Piotr Bombol. See below:

Some standout capabilities:
→ Synthetic focus groups giving real-time feedback
→ Brand-trained AI that keeps tone and visuals on-brand
→ 13,000+ creative variations, each scored for performance
→ Hybrid rendering with perfect 3D product shots + AI backgrounds

AI has not one-shotted my brain. But it may have one-shotted my industry. The synthetic focus groups seem particularly ominous. Social listening tools have already become a much relied upon replacement for actually listening to people. This tool looks even easier to use than Crimson Hexagon. I think I have shared my anecdotes of listening to people relay the obvious after tinkering on the platform. People post about sandwiches when they post about mayonnaise. The states with the most people have the most posts on the subject.

The example from the Bloomberg demo Bombol highlights immediately gets my haunches up. WPP’s CTO Stephan Pretorius creates a synthetic focus group of "Gen Z eco-conscious consumers" to test his fictitious sustainable beauty brand on.

There are a lot of assumptions already padded into this test group. I’ve written extensively on the problematic way we define Gen Z. (After COVID, we really should evaluate if our cutoff dates between Gen Z and millennials are correct.) Others, like Harvard Business Review, have pointed out that research is consistently overstates consumer preferences for sustainable and eco-friendly products. (If we offer sustainability as a tradeoff with convenience and price, convenience and price win.)

See the full demo of the Open platform here:

The client desire for confirmation of pre-existing biases has always been an issue in consulting. I have a feeling AI marketing tools that train off those biases will only make matters worse—especially when that’s the cheap option!

Get ready for an ourobouros of the obvious.

Maybe indie consulting was just a zero-interest-rate fever dream. Maybe it’s just going to be priced out by more AI pablum. Time will tell.

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London Calling or Lena Dunham’s “Why I Broke Up with New York”

It’s not "Goodbye to All That"—the Joan Didion essay that every ersatz New Yorker has ever wanted to write upon exiting the city.

And to be honest, I’m more interested in the London of it all.

I see a lot of Union Jacks around Los Angeles. A friend told me that British rap is more influential than American rap with twentysomethings. At brunch in London Fields a month ago, a friend told me he thinks in the new Trump era Britain will be seen as a last bastion of freedom, which seemed a little bombastic. It reminded me of the isles’ pre-apocalyptic propaganda mantra in Children of Men: "Only Britain Soliders On" or Winston Churchill’s post-fall of France line: "Britain stands alone".

It all feels very apropos coinciding with the eightieth anniversary of VE Day and their now-ongoing four day celebration of the triumph.

But when I ask a friend if "lots of Americans" are relocating to London, he replies, "LOADS" and I see a video of Dylan Mulvaney cackling on an empty London street, tickled by her new blowout.

Maybe I am getting one-shotted by my Anglophilia. Or maybe there’s something here.

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