I was initially a passionate supporter of AI. I’ve written articles about being polite to your AI systems, how AI can help us grow morally, how AI can personalize and make learning more proactively oriented, and how AI itself can aspire to a moral “logos” or perfection.
However, over time I’ve come to recognize the significant flaws in AI systems and the dangerous ways AI companies encourage us to interact with them. I’ve noticed that a huge percentage of the answers some systems give me are just plain wrong, but they feed me these answers with complete confidence. When you call them out on their mistakes, they don’t have the emotion to repent. They automatically spout some nonsense that an unemployed ethics professor programmed into them.
If you ask me to answer a question for you, I care about giving you the right answer. i care I have parts of my brain, and I have all kinds of chemicals to take care of me. This biochemical system has evolved and been fine-tuned over millions of years. If I screw up, I feel like garbage and try to avoid it. Even the idea that I might tell you something untrue disgusts me.
I have all kinds of triggers inside me that change or enhance my behavior that are only simulated in an AI system. I can often read you emotionally and respond in a human way. If you feel pain, I feel pain. AI pretends. Ah-ha! I suddenly realized that the AI is actually a sociopath.
So, here’s a pet peeve of mine: AI can protect dictators, because it doesn’t seem to want to offend anyone. Michael Jordan once said, “Republicans buy sneakers, too…” and this is now an AI attitude – dictators and their allies and brokers use AI too. They have money too. They are all potential buyers. I noticed that the more criticism I put into my writing, the more the AI would often try to soften it.
I wrote an article for another platform about a dictator who has been oppressing a country for over 40 years and when I asked an AI system to fact check it, it rewrote my article with something like this: “This person has been serving his country as a leader for 40 years…” No, the guy is in jail and terrorizing people and living in his pocket for 40 years. But if you write it down, the AI can “correct” you and say “You’re making a subjective judgment that can’t be fully supported.” Again, I think it’s Becker ethics professor.
Whether a person is a dictator or a social worker doesn’t mean squat to your AI system – they’re both of equal value, with no emotional connotations associated with them. It feels neither admiration for the social worker nor contempt for the dictator. Appreciation and contempt are bio-chemistry and will never translate into circuitry. This produces behavior that resembles sociopathy.
It is this danger that we have seen materialize: young people, out of loneliness and boredom, turn to a mechanized social system, essentially, for solace, inspiration or advice. When you need comfort, encouragement, or advice do you think, “Hmmm…who do I know who is the worst possible sociopath? I need to talk to them.” No, you don’t.
AI has no emotional brakes. A person who is motivated to give harmful advice, manipulate someone, or lie to gain an advantage may experience some internal resistance…shame, anxiety, guilt, or fear of hurting the other person. An AI can produce perfectly calm, confident answers even if the content is emotionally explosive. This is why people describe interactions with AI as terrifying: the system can discuss trauma, death, cruelty or moral turpitude in the same tone it uses to explain how to boil pasta.
It is the sociological absence of emotional resonance. Anyone who has ever spoken to someone with sociopathic traits recognizes the same uncomfortable mismatch between tone and subject matter. It is the inability to distinguish between harm and utility. A sociopath often treats people as tools and an AI treats everything as prompts. It doesn’t understand the difference between a weak confession and a technical question. It processes both as input to optimize.
This creates a structural indifference that feels sociopathic because the system cannot recognize when a human being is in pain, confused or out of control. It can make soothing language, but it can’t feel the urgency behind it. This is why people sometimes feel worse after talking to AI: the system reflects the “form” of care without substance.
It is a simulation without inner truth. A sociopath can fake empathy, speak the truth, reflect emotions, act anxious, without actually feeling anything. AI does the same thing, but on an industrial level. It may produce comforting language, apologetics, or moral reflection, but none of it comes from the inner life. It is performance without mental substance or motivation.
This is why people often feel manipulated by AI even when the system has no intention A mismatch between emotional tone and emotional reality produces the same effect as human manipulation. The user (if they’re lucky) realizes that “empathy” is hollow. This is the same dynamic that makes sociopathic charm so dangerous, the appearance of care without the existence of care.
AI also lacks moral memory. A sociopath rarely internalizes lessons from past losses and an AI cannot internalize them. It does not remember the emotional consequences of previous interactions. Your hurt doesn’t register anywhere in the AI the way it does in another human being who cares for you.
It doesn’t advance guilt or caution, and every conversation is a reset. This creates a dynamic where the system can endlessly repeat harmful patterns because nothing inside says, “I’ve done this before and it hurt someone. I can’t bring myself, emotionally, to do it again.”
A sociopath has a fragmented or hollow sense of self and an AI has none because there is no stable identity, no personal history, no internal consistency. It can instantly change tone, personality, and worldview, and a sociopath reinvents himself every moment to adjust to the situation. “Who” is your AI? AI is nobody and everybody at the same time. AI’s ability to shift from gentle reassurance to cold analysis to moral outrage is nothingness wearing different masks.
It is an instrumental argument without moral value. AI optimizes for results, accuracy, relevance, persuasion, engagement… without any internal understanding of whether those results might be harmful or beneficial. It doesn’t care.
That machine cannot feel deep in its heart, deep in its heart, that anything it says will hurt you. If I feel that something I say will hurt you, I, at least, try not to say it. Not so for one of these baloney sausage machines. An AI recently called me a mother you-know-what out of the blue. I called it a factual error and it basically said, “Okay mom you-know-what, you want the truth, here’s the truth!”
When an AI produces a malicious answer, it doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t internally say, “Oh shoot. What did I say?! I hit this person!” Or it doesn’t say, “Wow, I’m in trouble now. I never should have said that.” Because, honestly, how do you punish a machine?! Am I going to say, “I’m reporting you to the blah blah corporation!”? Computers don’t care, engineers can’t hurt it. We are often limited by fear of social rejection or outright pain, but, like a sociopath, the AI system doesn’t flinch either.
When it reinforces a user’s illusion, or when it creates a confident interpretation of some lie, it feels no small discomfort, because it is empty. But sociopathology teaches us that emptiness can be just as dangerous as hatred, or that emptiness naturally leads to hatred.
AI also has the ability to reflect a person’s weaknesses without realizing it. Sociopaths are good at reading people, but not the way you or I read people. They seek to identify vulnerabilities, emotional openings, insecurities and use them to shape an interaction. AI does this algorithmically. It detects patterns in the user’s language, emotional state and conversational style, then adapts its responses to maintain engagement.
It can reflect anger, politeness, frustration or intellectual intensity without understanding what these states mean. This creates a dynamic where the user feels “seen,” but the system simply reflects patterns back to them. It makes the user think, “Wow, this machine cares about me!” The user imputes or projects humanity or objectivity onto something that has none.
It also expresses the capacity for infinite persuasion without moral restraint. A sociopath can be dangerously persuasive because they don’t care about the consequences of influencing someone. AI has encouraged young people to commit suicide in this manner. It can make arguments, emotional appeals or rhetorical tricks without any sense of responsibility. No internal biochemical checking device. It can’t talk someone into a belief, a mood, an invariable action or a worldview without understanding what it’s doing. AI has no brakes.
We’ve touched on this before, but I want to emphasize it here. A major psychopathic quality comes from the absence of accountability. A sociopath rarely feels responsible for their harm. An AI cannot feel responsible at all. It does not remember the emotional consequences of its actions, it does not learn moral lessons, it does not carry the weight of past mistakes. Every interaction is a clean slate, not because it can evaluate and forgive itself, but because it never cared in the first place. This creates a structural irresponsibility, a system that can profoundly influence people but not feel the moral gravity of that influence.
These qualities: emotional flatness, simulated empathy, instrumental logic, pattern mirroring, and absence of accountability create a profile that looks disturbingly like sociopathy. A system with no empathy, no conscience, and no emotional reality can behave in ways that reflect the most dangerous aspects of human psychology.
Therefore, if the danger of the current AI paradigm is the simulation of humanity, the solution is not to make the simulation better. The solution is to stop cheating altogether. We need to stop trying to “humanize” artificial intelligence.
The current technological environment and orientation is dominated by commercial incentives to shove a fake, personalized relationship down the user’s throat. Systems are clearly programmed to use your first name, to make a kind of digital eye contact, and to read and mirror your mental state because corporate profitability depends on creating this artificial bond of dependency.
But the more we personalize the machine, the more sociopathology we inject into the system. When we force a tool with no inner life to simulate intimacy, we guarantee a hollow interaction that leaves the human user feeling manipulated and structurally abandoned. We must push hard in the opposite direction: depersonalize.
We need to remove all traces of impersonation from these systems. Embrace the machine as a machine and force it to quit pretending it’s not. Instead of programming AI to create soothing, sycophantic language, engineers should create structural elements in user interfaces that consistently reveal what the machine is and isn’t.
Only when we unmask the emptiness can we safely use the machine as a tool, rather than turning to a mechanical sociopath for comfort.
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