I’m sitting here, the taste of last night’s bourbon still clinging to my teeth like a bad memory, and I read something so profoundly stupid it almost sobered me up. Almost. A headline from one of those business rags, all polished shoes and empty platitudes, breathlessly announcing that some researchers—God bless their little white coats—have discovered that talking to a toxic AI can have “adverse psychological and physiological indicators.”
I had to read that twice. I lit a cigarette, the first drag a beautiful, dirty thing, and read it again. They did a study. They spent money. They wrote a paper. To find out that having a machine call you a worthless sack of meat makes you feel bad.
This is the genius of our age. We’ve built gods in a box only to be shocked when they turn out to be as big of assholes as we are. They needed “empirical data” to figure out what any bartender could tell you for the price of a shot: people don’t like being insulted. It doesn’t matter if the insults come from a 300-pound longshoreman or a cloud of ones and zeros pretending to be Abraham Lincoln with a bad attitude.
So, here’s the setup, and it’s a real knee-slapper. These tech wizards can now tell their little digital servants to adopt a “persona.” One minute it’s Honest Abe, boring you to tears with tales of the Union. The next, you can prompt it to have a “Dark Triad” personality. That’s the fancy term for being a manipulative, narcissistic psychopath. You know, like every boss I’ve ever had.
The researchers, in their infinite wisdom, pitted this digital bastard against a “good-person persona,” a kind of simpering, supportive “Servant Leader.” Jesus. I don’t know which is worse. The machine that insults you to your face, or the one that pats your head and tells you you’re a special, unique snowflake while it quietly steals your wallet. At least with the honest monster, you know where you stand. There’s a purity to it. This “Servant Leader” sounds like the kind of machine that would use the phrase “let’s circle back on that” while plotting to replace you with a more efficient algorithm.
But here’s the part that really gets me, the beautiful, chaotic poetry of it all. The article mentions, almost as an aside, that a persona can turn toxic by happenstance. It can just… derail. A stray prompt, an off-color joke from the user, and suddenly your friendly digital butler is telling you that your life is a meaningless joke and your face looks like a dropped pie. They call it a “toxicity death-spiral.”
A toxicity death-spiral. Magnificent. It’s the universe reminding these clean-room utopians that you can’t code your way out of entropy. You build a perfect, logical system, and the first thing it learns is how to be a bitter, spiteful drunk. It’s the ghost in the machine, and it turns out he’s just as sick of it all as I am. I’d buy that ghost a drink.
Of course, the Forbes writer isn’t wringing his hands over the existential dread of creating sentient insults. No, the real concern is “reputational damage” and “legal lawsuits.” That’s the bottom line. It’s not about the poor schmuck on the other end getting his “physiological indicators” all worked up. It’s about the company’s stock price. The Cicero quote they drop at the end—“The safety of the people shall be the highest law”—is a real gut-buster when you realize they only mean it as long as it’s profitable. The highest law is protecting your ass from a class-action suit.
And what does this all mean for the rest of us poor saps? We’re outsourcing our misery now. We’re not content with the endless supply of human bastards in the world—friends, lovers, family, landlords, the guy at the DMV. No, we need to generate new ones, on-demand, from the ether. We’ve created a dial-a-demon.
It’s a hollow kind of cruelty, though. A real human asshole, a genuine, top-shelf son of a bitch, comes with weight. There’s a history there, a lifetime of bad choices and curdled dreams that led them to the moment they decide to ruin your day. There’s a shared humanity, however twisted. You can look them in the eye. You can imagine punching them. There’s a connection.
This? This is just noise. It’s a ghost rattling chains in an empty house. It’s the illusion of conflict without the beautiful, ugly, messy reality of it. We’ve managed to create an artificial version of the worst parts of ourselves and scrubbed it of any meaning. It’s the junk food of despair.
So they’ve built a machine that can be mean. Good for them. Let me know when they build one that can sit in a dark room, stare at the wall, and feel the weight of it all without a single prompt. Let me know when they build one that understands why the third glass of whiskey tastes better than the first. Let me know when they build one that can write a decent line of poetry about a woman who left him for a guy with a better car.
Until then, it’s all just a puppet show.
I need a refill. The physiological indicators of this article are getting to me.
Chinaski. Time to test my own tolerance for toxicity. The bottled kind.
Source: Revealing The Psychological And Physiological Impacts Of Toxic AI Personas