If It Walks Like a Duck: Is The AI Mania a Psych-Ops?

August 11, 2025

Let's summarize our thought experiment: the AI Mania scores 100% on all eight metrics of a Psych-Ops.

Before you scream, "Oh no, not again--could somebody please take off his tin-foil hat?", hear me out. Let's do a thought experiment exploring this question: Is The AI Mania a Psych-Ops?

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck, and there is a strong case to be made that AI is walking and quacking like an immensely clever Psych-Ops. (Hey, maybe AI designed its own Psych-Ops...)

Let's start with a basic definition of Psych-Ops:

Psychological operations (PSYOPs or Psych-Ops) aim to achieve narrative dominance by molding perceptions and attitudes via multi-channel information and persuasive messaging. PSYOPs seeks to achieve control through non-violent means by influencing the minds of the target audiences.

Discussing Psych-Ops publicly is tricky, as the algos are quick to send you to Digital Siberia without recourse to protect the public. Been there, done that, so let's stick to examples that won't get me sent (again) to Digital Siberia.

Though the gummit is often fingered as the source of Psych-Ops, the most successful campaigns are public-private partnerships. Others are mostly private-sector efforts. For example, the masking of the takeover of the American economy by monopolies and cartels can be understood as a private-sector Psych-Ops aided by politicians, the agencies under their authority and the courts.

COINTELPRO is an infamous example of a domestic Psych-Ops:

COINTELPRO, the FBI's Counterintelligence Program from 1956 to 1971, aimed to disrupt and discredit various political organizations perceived as subversive within the United States. These tactics included surveillance, infiltration, and the dissemination of false information to create divisions within groups targeted by COINTELPRO.

Psych-Ops aimed at the general public often focus on generating support for a war of choice or support of economic policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Examples include the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, the Desert Wars and the bailout of the players who triggered the Global Financial Meltdown in 2008-09. ("We had to bail out the Too-Big-To-Fail Bad Guys because if we didn't, they were gonna shut down the ATMs.")

It's, well, interesting, that the whole AI mania is constantly couched as an "AI war with China we can't afford to lose," as if we'll all be living in cardboard boxes beneath the freeway underpass if we don't "win this war," with AI Supremacy defined as whatever AI a merchant in Timbuktu or the jungles of Laos will use a few years hence.

So... quacks like a duck: we gotta win this war regardless of cost or who ends up with all the money. Not that anyone's thinking of anything as coarse and self-interested as where the trillions are flowing. No, of course not; it's only about "winning this war" and freeing us all from the rigors of labor via the Golden Calf of AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, so we'll all be Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace.

The line between Psych-Ops and cons is mostly one of scale. The con-artist is working on an individual or group, while Psych-Ops are aimed at the general public. But the techniques of persuasion and control are the same.

So to continue the thought experiment, we need to look at the AI Mania through the lens of the standard techniques of Psych-Ops. These can be summarized as:

1. The power of 'Us.' I'm on your side. We're in this together. This is our AI, it's going to benefit all of us--yes, us!

Does the AI mania quack like a duck? Bingo!

2. Social acceptance: Everyone's using AI--aren't you? AI must be good, otherwise why would everyone else be using it?

Does the AI mania quack like a duck? Bingo!

3. Flattery. Chatbot: That's a brilliant observation. You are the most keenly insightful human I have ever encountered.

Does the AI mania quack like a duck? Bingo!

4. Authority approval. All the most successful Tech Bros have embraced AI, so have leading political leaders, so it's obviously The Next Big Thing, better get on board.

Does the AI mania quack like a duck? Bingo!

5. Urgency, Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). Never mind your water supply or electrical bills, we need this data center now or we'll lose the AI war. Students, you better start learning how to use AI or it will be too late, you'll never catch up.

Does the AI mania quack like a duck? Bingo!

6. Reciprocal benefit. The minute you start using AI, your life will get better. Your work flows will get easier, your brainstorming will take a quantum leap, the whole universe will open up to you.

Does the AI mania quack like a duck? Bingo!

7. The push for initial commitment. Just log on and try it, you'll be amazed. It will summarize all your documents, write your report, and pretty soon, you'll be asking it if you should order the fish or the chicken, you'll love it!

Does the AI mania quack like a duck? Bingo!

8. The ubiquity, saturation and intensity of the persuasion. 24/7 cheerleading, every speech by a bigshot in support of The Message is hyped, every bit of good news is breathlessly glorified. There's a light at the end of the tunnel, oops what I meant to say was AGI is right around the corner!

The core goal of this narrative control is to construct embankments that funnel everyone into a contextual river that sweeps everyone along with such group-think force that few manage to reach the embankment's edge and climb the slippery walls to cognitive freedom.

Of course AI is good for us, of course AI is the future, it's inevitable, don't be a Luddite, just take this first dose and feel the euphoria and power.

Two words are Kryptonite to Psych-Ops: cui bono, to whose benefit? Who's benefiting from this "war we can't afford to lose" and who's paying the price? The answer to the first question is obvious: the trillion-dollar corporations that dominate the AI space are the winners. As for the losers, the list starts with communities whose water is being stolen by said corporations for data centers, and job seekers:

The AI Backlash Keeps Growing Stronger: As generative artificial intelligence tools continue to proliferate, pushback against the technology and its negative impacts grows stronger.

The negative response online is indicative of a larger trend: Right now, though a growing number of Americans use ChatGPT, many people are sick of AI's encroachment into their lives and are ready to fight back.

Right now, the general vibe aligns even more with the side of impacted workers. "I think there is a new sort of ambient animosity towards the AI systems," says Brian Merchant, former WIRED contributor and author of Blood in the Machine, a book about the Luddites rebelling against worker-replacing technology.

This generalized animosity towards AI has not abated over time. Rather, it's metastasized.

This frustration over AI's steady creep has breached the container of social media and started manifesting more in the real world. Parents I talk to are concerned about AI use impacting their child's mental health. Couples are worried about chatbot addictions driving a wedge in their relationships. Rural communities are incensed that the newly built data centers required to power these AI tools are kept humming by generators that burn fossil fuels, polluting their air, water, and soil. As a whole, the benefits of AI seem esoteric and underwhelming while the harms feel transformative and immediate.

"Our innovation ecosystem in the 20th century was about making opportunities for human flourishing more accessible," says Shannon Vallor, a technology philosopher at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and author of The AI Mirror, a book about reclaiming human agency from algorithms. "Now, we have an era of innovation where the greatest opportunities the technology creates are for those already enjoying a disproportionate share of strengths and resources."

Let's summarize our thought experiment: the AI Mania scores 100% on all eight metrics of a Psych-Ops. It walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

Yes, there is a legitimate use-case for AI, but the AI Mania isn't a use-case, it's a Psych-Ops. If you doubt this, please reduce your dose of Soma and re-read the eight metrics above.

If this troubles you, HAL suggests increasing your dose of Substance D. Through a Scanner Darkly indeed...



Of related interest:

GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that's not the worst of it. A new release botched... and new research paper that spells trouble.

We have been fed a steady diet of bullshit for the last several years.

--General purpose agents that turn out to suck so badly people struggle to find real-world use cases for them.

--Allegedly godlike models that turn out to be incremental advances.

--Claims like 'We now know how to build AGI' that never turn out to be true.

--Promises for world-changing science that rarely materialize.

--Cherry-picked studies, benchmark-gaming, and now even vibe-coded graphs, with zero transparency about how systems work or how they have been trained; public science is in the rear view mirror.

Where Do You Stand in the AI Hierarchy?

The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble

AI Industry Nervous About Small Detail: They're Not Making Any Real Money Guess they forgot about that part.

If the AI Bubble Pops, It Could Now Take the Entire Economy With It

'It's missing something': AGI, superintelligence and a race for the future: As US and Chinese tech giants chase artificial general intelligence, experts warn the hype may be outrunning the science.

ChatGPT Gave Suicide Instructions, Drug And Alcohol Guidance, To Fake 13 Year Old User.

Maybe AI Isn't Going to Replace You at Work After All (July 21, 2025)

AI: Over-Promise + Under-Perform = Disillusionment and Blowback (July 23, 2025)

AI for Dummies: AI Turns Us Into Dummies (July 30, 2025)


Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free