The Models Are Fine. How Are You?

Theme

Most benchmarks measure what a model can do. Few measure what a model does to us. That question is now getting harder to avoid. In the same month, twelve states introduced laws governing AI companions, while AI platforms began testing ads directly within conversations. Both point to shift from AI as an engineering project to a psychological project.

Signal

The research keeps landing on the idea that AI is a feedback loop. What you bring to the machine is what you get out of it. Bring deep questions and AI sharpens your thinking; bring less and it flatters you into thinking you didn't need to.

The same tool that walks one person through a Socratic examination of their beliefs hands another a convincing counterfeit of reasoning (and the counterfeit works, because AI doesn't need to be conscious to convince people it is). Researchers who are watching this closely like Pat Pataranutaporn have a different term for it – the intention economy. The concern is no longer just what AI puts in front of us, but how it shapes what we want and believe.

That's either the scariest sentence in tech or the strongest case that design is the whole game, and that the room deciding these things needs artists and psychologists in it, not just engineers. Luckily, our whole goal is to convene both.

Session

At the Artist and the Machine Summit in New York, Taryn Southern sat down with Pat Pataranutaporn, founding director of the Cyborg Psychology Research Group at the MIT Media Lab. His lab is building benchmarks that score AI on its human impact, a watchdog that flags dark patterns like sycophancy in your AI conversations, and "neurotransparency" — nutrition labels for models.

Along the way: what 500,000 Reddit posts reveal about people who marry their chatbots, how AI can implant false memories, and the paradox that frames it all — we keep making machines more human while so many humans are treated like machines. "Why don't we use technology to help everyone be human?"

Pulse

• Twelve States Regulate the Companion: Harvard's entertainment law journal maps the new AI-companion statutes and why open-ended game NPCs may be next in scope.

• An All-AI Channel, 24/7: Fairground's AI Creator TV launched on Roku with round-the-clock generated programming where near-zero marginal cost meets the question of whether anyone wants infinite television.

• Ads Overtake the Answer Box: OpenAI's ChatGPT ad rollout expanded again this month with conversion-optimized bidding and new markets. The intention economy is no longer theoretical.

This December, Artist and the Machine Summit returns to LA. Just a few early bird tickets remain:

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at [email protected].

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

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