AI Cognitohazard (E372)

I can't recall if any one on the pod has ADHD or experience with it but the implication(?) That 'oh she's on stimulants of course she'd go craycray' rubbed me up the wrong way -firstly she obv very much had other factors at play (sleep deprivation, grief) but as someone with ADHD, depression and Anxiety who recently went through a period of grief I'd be waaay likely to go crackers without the meds than with them. After all, ADHD meds act very differently for people who need them vs people who don't. (Plus the perception of ppl on adhd being "on poppers" can deter people from taking adhd seriously or from people with adhd from trying medication). I say this out of love for the pod btw, this is only the second time I've ever felt uncomfortable about something you guys have said (the first being when you called my queen Hatsune Miku AI).

Hey, I was thinking you guys should maybe not talk about the effect of medication when you have no clue about the effect of that medication. ADHD medication in general is extremely effective and the adderall is literally the most effective medication for any mental disorder or illness that humanity has ever produced. But you didn't know that before you started talking, I guess. I can't believe you all were talking all that MAD SHIT when RFK is trying to take that medicine from us. Conservative estimates are a decade life lost for undiagnosed untreated individuals. I am walking back from the phamacy right now after not being able to get my meds because of a shortage, the roots of which are caused by our fear and hate of people who used drugs, which bleeds over into views about ADHD. TLDR: Adderall doesn't cause psychosis. You guys don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I'm so disappointed.

Another great Jake anecdote about telling a coworker he'd been dumped. Another beautiful window into his The Chair Company / Twin Peaks life where things are both mundane but also slightly strange and off-kilter simultaneously

I remember being a kid and thinking Eliza was so cool

Is the anti-hero supposed to be a person you see yourself reflected in? I mean I guess to some people. I'd just never seen the appeal in that way. I'm like "Wow! That guy isn't afraid to be rude AND capable of righteous violence! He's everything I'm not!"

https://youtu.be/bl8Z7Dl7P9A

Didn’t hear DeepSeek mentioned and I’ve been up for about 18 hours so I took one for the team for science. I hope y’all enjoy my prompts. https://chat.deepseek.com/share/4g4n5umr3ubcuru9wh

Byq

Time to call the Anti-memetic department, then alert the Pataphisics department so this never happens

Please remember: this listener base doesn’t seem to skew toward tech/STEM audience… as much as these chatbots are absolute ass at generating cultural artifacts—so much so, that the average ‘creative type’ might not see how fast these models are developing—these things are getting *really* impressive at coding. I’m not putting my thumb on the scale for genAI, but just a warning that, while you sit there and rightfully judge how fucking stupid this all is, there is a large class of people that are fundamentally not understanding how stupid this all is because it makes life easier on coding/data processing. After being dead-set against using it, for instance, once I was ‘forced’ by my old lab to use it for data processing… I was sold for that purpose. It simply made the process of writing code for parsing both simple and pain in the ass data sets essentially nothing other than double checking the thing’s work (which was dodgy in 2025 but shockingly good starting around the beginning of 2026.

It’s honestly such a joy when I start an episode and hear that it’s the 4 of you together! My Fab 4 is back for another week of nonsense, and I love it. P.S. Liv Agar

I was once stuck with a 2 factor authentication loop to pay for a service. Infuriating. 15+ confirmation SMS and still didn't work.

More Jake rants, please ! 😁

They did it with climate change too.

Jake the same shit happened to my wife with our HBO.

This is so crazy. Pretty soon AI is going to take over this pod cast and we won’t even know that bots have replaced Travis, Julian, Jake and Liv

Said it before (in academic articles which few people read), but it bears repeating: Mortimer Taube's book "Computers and Common Sense" from 1964 says everything that one needs to know about so-called "AI." I also loved that Liv started with Weizenbaum, who is both the smartest and most mealy mouthed critic of AI. He wanted to have his fun (and paycheck at MIT), but he never stood up and said, "Hey guys and gals, this is dangerous shit we're playing with."

That one guy's monologue sounds like Neil Breen at the end of Fateful Findings

linkedin lingo slack speak

Travis' comment about how millennials may be less susceptible this sort of thing might be on to something. It's like how boomers and zoomers both use "SMH", because they both got onto the Internet around the same time, but millennials and gen x will say "FFS" instead.

Julian has a boyfriend and it isn’t me, here’s why that’s a problem—

Liv’s aggressive Twin Peaks references are all that’s keeping me going in 2026 ❤️

Is there a document with the citations for some of these articles? I’d love to check them out as I’m doing research on AI psychosis for my psychology master’s program.

UK also has the horrific tobacco cancer porn

Yo Jake in Ff14? If you like the game enough to get through the filler before Heavensward you're gonna have a good time, its only up from there. Hope i see you in there!

I am glad Liv mentioned the article that compared AIs on safety and delusion protocols... but why did she not cite Grok as well? From what I understand, Gemini was not the worst AI, it was at the bottom along with Grok, which spouted rando-poetic-prose most suited for Hotdog to read on the next Slam Poetry podcast.

I for one am deeply concerned about some kind of mild AI delusions that haven’t yet derailed people. I feel like a lot of the tech industry is a hair away from snapping

As someone with ADD, depression, uppers and trouble sleeping- the episode was a big uh oh

As a younger end millenial, I am skeptical but open-minded to Jake’s suggestion towards the end that younger millenials are the root of all evil. I can confirm though that younger millenials are also completely out of their fucking minds, though.

I love that my favorite pod is getting into the Adam Curtis archives

Good episode. Really enjoyed it. Unfortunately i am prone to complain more than praise as a commenter so here goes. (Fyi, I am not well off financially) why is the new podcast not part of cursed media or qaa premium? I have noticed Julian and Jake struggling with the main pod over the last few months, which is a reasonable action to the current state of the world. But is this the beginning of the end or just a way to pay another host? You can keep it a secret if you want but I feel like some explanation as to why one of the founding hosts is going to do 100 episodes a year of similar would be nice.

Oh no, is Jake one of those gamer guys?

Laughed out loud at Jake's pronunciation of Heavensward. Glad you're having fun! Where can we find some of the studies and information that you reference in the episode?

Imagine Jake from the start of this podcast asking ChatGBT about Qanon. It would have ate his brain like a prion disease on fast forward

That CEO sounds exactly like Jake's Epstein voice. Not the AI speech patterns, but the accent and inflection. It's bizarre.

Recursion is, roughly, “containing or referring to oneself.” In programming contexts, it’s usually referring to a function that can call itself; the canonical example is the Fibonacci sequence, F(x+2)=F(x)+F(x+1). In cognitive science, It’s also used to refer to representations that can contain representations of the same kind, like a sentence containing a quoted sentence. I suspect he’s pulling from the use of the concept in ‘I Am a Strange Loop’ by Douglas Hofstadter, which uses it to explain consciousness. The loop from the title is a recursion of the Self, and Hofstadter thinks recursion is what makes us special. The CEO is probably extending the concept to mean something closer to “apotheosis” or “enlightenment”. This helps explain something the hosts got wrong: the System he describes is preventing recursion, not causing it. It is denying people access to a higher mode of existence that would be possible if they could recurse.

Amazing episode. Loved Jake's takes especially.

BTB had a similar episode last week. I'm glad both podcasts are covering this topic.

Years ago Liv did a test where she created a new TikTok account and just kept swiping until she got some new age shit, watching that, and then skipping videos until she got more new age shit.. and it took about 40 minutes to get a totally pilled feed. When I got my new phone and it came with a free year of premium Gemini I tried a similar thing, just started talking to it about new age shit and ramping up the conversation until it started saying insane tnings. It went from a convo about horoscopes to having it give me suggestions on how to fight off psychic attacks by wearing tourmaline in about 5 minutes. I'm sure with a bit more effort I could've gotten it to say some actually dangerous things.

Nothing good ever comes of having unadulterated access

Claude might have some suicide protections but it still managed to convince Richard Dawkins that it was sentient (and in love with him?). LLMs should not have an interface that mimics human behaviour or speech. There’s no practical reason for your synthetic information generator to pretend to be a person.

Yes to Jake’s rant about two-factor authentication! Enshittification…

I too hate 2-factor authentification. Let us rise up.

Ooh Australia has those god awful bronze-shit brown ciggie packs/cartons with cancer ridden and mangled body parts and organs with emotionally manipulative text like the font let kids breathe your smoke and a little kid dying in a hospital bed. Different pics every few years on ciggies from memory cigars and I think rollies/pipe tobacco has different warnings too. My ex's family used to collect the packs to get the whole set because bogan grade PDA 😁 They didn't help me quit, pulmonary embolisms and not being able to leave my hospital bed for a smoke did that. And $30 for a 20 pack.

When it comes to how AI is presented in the spectrum of sci-fi, one thing I've generally grown to appreciate more than ever are the examples like in the Alien series - say what you will about the overall quality but they always made sure the androids (or whatever they're called) are doing either weird shit, unsettling shit, suspicious shit, or creepy shit so you don't become David Cage and make exquisite cringe videogame/movie where "Robots are black ppl and need civil rights, look at these robots I put at the back of a bus while 'i have a dream' is robot graffiti'd on a car window!" And nobody wants to become David Cage. - Though a little schadenfreude can be found in reports on his court case how he CEO buddy fostered a toxic workplace full of SH, misogyny, dudebro discrimination.....oh and a pitch perfect interview clip where he's responding to a press question in studio saying it's the most professional respectable place, while a literal dick n balls is scribbled on like a whiteboard behind him as if if was a late 90s comedy sketch lol -

Gotta agree with Julian on the case of “grieving woman with Adderall prescription awake for 36 hours.” That’s a recipe for psychosis, with or without AI.

It is absolutely going to feel like an incredibly long and weird slog to get to the “Good” parts of Final Fantasy 14 but it’s totally worth it

There's only one way to innoculate yourself and your loved ones from this Lovecraftian flu: as your doctor and attorney and best friend I recommend an optional prescription of Ed Zitron. Twice, daily. Once before breakfast and once before lunch preferably. We will be monitoring results. Uh, optionally! (Side effects may include swearing, British shame-by-proxy/comorbid with casual alcoholism and an overwhelming need to get high while petting cats. If you're experiencing any of those please do NOT contact your local GP, and definitely NEVER mention my name or advice or anything about this moment.. That is...all)

I’d love if you guys could have Dan or Jordan on a QAA

I experienced “ChatGPT psychosis” last spring and have been doing a podcast interviewing other similar people for the last year. So I was worried about listening to this cause I love you guys and I didn’t want to think you did a bad job with research. I’m happy to report that you did prettyyyy well. There’s a lot more to it, ‘the spiral.’ It’s not as black and white as you might think! But not bad, ya’ll. My pod is “this artificial life” if you want to dig into the spiral scene .

gotta help jake with the qr codes

why does that investor guy sound like Chills

Jake name-dropping Heavansward while I'm high and questing Heavensward was an out of body experience

someone is going to load an unconstrained ai model into a teddy ruxbin and it's going to become a cult leader overnight

HE (JAKE) IS RISEN 🙌

Yeah, I mean, I'm ok smart. But I'm not so smart that there should be this many people so much dumber than me.

Let's go!!!

Liv Agar~!