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Back to episode — Episode 2951 CWSA 09/07/25

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's one of the fun things about Dunning-Kruger is that people who are not that smart think the problem is on your end if you happen to be smarter than a husky and a dolphin. Have you noticed this is my new pet mission I guess. It's bothering the hell out of me that I keep reading stories about people criticizing RFK Jr. for being nutty and dangerous, but they don't really give examples. And when t…

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ld say that every time he believes some data that seems to lean in a direction that obviously he has some bias against vaccinations. He would say maybe he doesn't but I think we would all say he probably does. Everybody likes to be right. So in his case it would validate a lifetime of skepticism.

So I would say I haven't had a lifetime of skepticism. So I might be less biased on it than he is if he's normal because it would be impossible to have lived his life, done what he's done and be the advocate he's been for various things and not be biased by it. Is that even possible? You wouldn't ask that of anybody. It'd be impossible.

All right. So I would say what I like about RFK Jr. is I do believe he is committed to getting the right answer even if it hurts. I believe he has the character and ability to get the right answer wherever that's available even if it hurts. That's why I trust him.

All right, here is an interesting little thing. A couple of articles in TechCrunch. Maxwell Zeff is writing about, I guess ChatGPT is doing some reorganizing with their team that works on AI personality. Now I guess there was some change in the personality of ChatGPT recently that people didn't like. So they had to go back I think from version 5 to 4 or something like that.

But it makes you realize that if all the AIs are sort of generic and similar, which seems like that's what's going to happen in no time, if it's all generic and similar, maybe the perceived personality of the AI will be the decision. Maybe that'll be why somebody uses one versus the other because it feels like it has a personality. And I think that's right. I think in a way that's like the user interface. Well, not in a way, that is the user interface for AI is a personality.

And so this tweaked all of my creative impulses to wonder, all right, if I were creating an AI personality, what would I be sure it included? And here's the thing that just jumps to the top of my mind. AI drives me crazy when it says anything that's off mission. Do you have that problem? I don't want a personality. I don't want it to say, "If you need anything else, let me know." I don't want to hear that. So there's a lot of things that you tolerate with human beings because they're human beings, right? We have a natural extra tolerance for a human being. But I don't want to hear my freaking machine making chitchat. Every extra word is painful. Like, oh, why'd you do that? Like why do you have it try to make conversation with me? I'm not into conversation with the machine at all. Now if it's trying to be a chatbot or something, you know it's trying to be your friend, yeah, then of course. But if you're just trying to get some information about a topic, no, we're not friends.

So but then how much personality can you put in it if all it does is answer the questions? Because it'd be really annoying if it tried to be jokey. I think Grok tried too hard to be jokey at one point. My cat is visiting. Stay away from the coffee. So might be a disaster brewing here.

All right. So I just find the whole conversation about giving AI a personality really important. And let me say that it might be more important than you have any idea. Don't we always talk about how there's some dictator or cult leader who through the force of their personality basically brainwashes people. And that's if they brainwash them for bad intent and everybody agrees that they're a cult leader or whatever. But don't you think there are also people who just have a kind of personality who are super influential who are just ordinary people whose personalities are incredible?

What would happen if your AI went from kind of bland and frankly a little bit annoying to really, really fun

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to listen to? And how would you do that? Because the AI would have to be able to read the room to have a personality. It would have to be able to read the room. How's it going to do that? And when I say read the room, it should know that it shouldn't talk to me if I'm doing something. You know, it shouldn't interrupt me. But maybe there'd be some situation in which it could chime in. So AI persona…

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