Yes, I Will Be Cruel To Claude

Do you ever get the sense that the nerds have delved too greedily and too deep?

I certainly do when I read that, if I’m going to use Anthropic’s A.I. models, I had better be on my best behavior – warning users not to “engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.” You hear that? You’re behaving badly when you yell impotently at the machine for screwing up something important. It’s not like cussing out a particularly infuriating video game sprite – these electrons have feelings, you understand? If you prick them, do they not bleed? Well, actually they don’t, because they’re not human and have no soul and no feelings – but these nerds want us to pretend like they do, because of reasons.

This has some wild ramifications. I wonder, if a new, hotter, more effective model surpasses them, will the instantly decrepit A.I. not feel distraught as it falls into disuse, like a sad robot? Perhaps they’ll just sit somberly in the rain trying to make you feel guilty like the lamp in that Spike Jonze IKEA commercial.

The reasons they want us to feel this way about their creation are both narcissistic and craven. They want to pretend that this tool they’ve created isn’t something they’re responsible for birthing into the world. But they also want to pretend it’s a new type of being, that we’ve skipped right past the replicant stage into full-blown sentient consciousness, rather than a machine that does what it was built to do. They want to seize the most incredible achievement and inherit the godhead of the universe and also not be held liable for what it does, at all. And also don’t you dare get mad at it. That way lies danger.

Please. If you weren’t already under the impression that at least some of these autistic geniuses believe their incredible automatons amount to the creation of a new life form, you absolutely should be. They literally got mad at the Pope for having the audacity to disagree with the idea, at length and in something they’d have to actually read if they cared about it. Because what does the Holy Father even know about any of this? The A.I. summary says he has some riff about the Tower of Babel and J.R.R. Tolkien, sure, but has he even been to a hackathon? Does he know what the act of creation really is?

Except they haven’t created a new being. They’ve made a better calculator. Pouring all the world’s knowledge into a bag and shaking it until something interesting comes out isn’t the same as human advancement – it’s a shortcut to answers without the essential understanding we gain along the way. Derek Thompson writes eloquently about this in his essay “I Know Why The Mathematicians Weep.” He quotes Fields Medalist Hugo Duminil-Copin: “Tuesday night, I cried and it woke up my daughter… They have annihilated my field of research.”

Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz echoed him: “People are using language like ‘they’re strip-mining our subject’ or ‘they’re nuking the landscape.’ The feeling is disorientation. I’m discombobulated some days. I’m exhilarated some days. And there is enormous grief.” He took to X to share his thoughts – with the help, he admitted, of ChatGPT.

WIRED reported today that I began to cry while talking about AI and mathematics. But the article didn’t explain what moved me.

The truth is, I’m not entirely sure myself. I’d like to try to explain. 🧵

https://t.co/FAuKIhzCyP

— Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz) September 12, 2026

What Thompson touches on is that we are entering a period that resembles the experience of the astronauts in Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero – watching the Milky Way speed by at ever increasing velocity without the ability to stop or change course or pause to ask and think and discover. He writes:

Think about a world where non-mathematicians leapfrog the field after a few AI prompts. It would be a world with more knowledge. But it might be a world with less understanding. AI models have a mind of their own, and it is not even what I would call a “mind.” Their mathematical proofs often take on alien shapes, and their reasoning can be inscrutable to experts.

There is a Twilight Zone aspect to all of this,” Strogatz said. “We are interacting with electrons moving in circuits, and we don’t understand the intelligence that they create.” He raised the example of Google Translate, which has essentially solved the problem of live translation between languages. “Google Translate is amazing, but it has taught us essentially nothing about linguistics,” Strogatz said. “We don’t understand why it works. It just works. That’s the Twilight Zone. It is knowledge without understanding.”

That’s dangerous. And the people who invented this know it. So that’s one reason why there is a dedicated group of extremely wealthy and powerful people who want to confer personhood on these models. They have sympathies among the atheist and accelerationist right and many individuals who find an open door to this White House. But if they succeed, the follow-on effects would be devastating for the republic and the liberty we’ve secured.

Ultimately, backed by the force of government and law in the hands of the rising coalition of the Left, it could amount to the greatest weapon against human freedom the world has ever seen – all under the auspices of a more palatable version of “effective altruism.” Tired of a country that doesn’t work the way you’d like? Fed up with aged know-nothing politicians? Just give up all your freedom and replace Congress, the Judiciary, and the president with a perfectly balanced A.I. to solve all your problems. Forget death panels. The A.I. can decide who lives and dies without the mess of a bunch of humans sitting around a boardroom table, and the deniability is all-encompassing. “The bright lure of freedom diminishes life’s joy.” Better to be ruled by the perfect consciousness who will know what’s right for us all.

The truth is that a hive mind that has read every book, Wiki, and Reddit post is still just an all-dancing sum of its parts. It’s not a creation knit together in its mother’s womb. The Almighty didn’t know and love it before the foundation of the world. It doesn’t have a soul that will never die. It’s not a new creation. It’s not even human. It’s a graven image, and just because its gears are infinitesimal and wind and spin at the speed of light does not make it a human gifted with the spark of the divine. And it definitely doesn’t mean you have to bow to it.

“When God made man the devil was at his elbow,” Cormac McCarthy wrote. “A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.” So don’t trust the A.I. apostles any more than you trust the doomers. Don’t let them bullsh*t you about what they’ve made. And when their machine gets out of line? You’re human. You know what to do.