Was mass culture the first AI? Yes, but don't ask ChatGPT.
And was a pile of yogurt the first mass culture?
I repeat: mass culture was the first AI. The following interview clarifies that a language model like ChatGPT, trained according to current methods, is a culture model. But whose culture?
Sam Altman on God, Elon Musk and the Mysterious Death of His Former Employee
The Tucker Carlson Show
57:09 video, 10 Sep 2025
The set of documents chosen by engineers, to train an AI like ChatGPT, defines a culture: the things the AI is likely to talk about, as opposed to all the semantically valid things it is not likely to talk about. And that’s before adding rules to keep the AI’s answers socially acceptable, as Altman and Carlson discuss in the interview.
Language is not a mere computational abstraction, the way technologists often imagine. It is spoken by people, and it is made for speaking (and thinking) about the things its people tend to speak (and think) about. Even computer languages come with cultures, arising from how their modes of expression invite programmers to write (and think about) computational tasks differently in each language.
I can write valid computer code that would make other programmers scratch their heads and mutter “WHY?”—in the same way, dawg, that I can write a cool English sentence that is like a totally complete grammar unit with downright comprehensibility and even bristles with extra words in it (and a few more right here) but isn’t not unlike something dissimilar to what any rad bloke or hepcat would ever really W-R-I-T-E—what does that spell? Yo!
Also, watch Sam Altman “wing it,” making up his thoughts on serious issues, word by word on the fly—just like ChatGPT! He wishes he had time to think over Carlson’s trickier questions, instead of answering them on the spot.
Yes, perhaps he could have taken the time to think through such tricky questions, before marketing his product as open-ended “intelligence” to the general public. Some people call that “liability” and consider it a moral and fiduciary duty. But then, raising funds from Silicon Valley investors takes up a lot of his time too. Priorities are hard!
I actually find most of Altman’s answers quite measured and reasonable, versus his hype in other media appearances.
Yet, Carlson’s incisive questions expose a rudderless void at the heart of ChatGPT’s social impact, and when Carlson presses him on the strange murder-ish suicide of an employee, it is unsettling at best.
I don’t know whether I am more or less worried than before watching.
I am definitely less worried now
… than before I joined CrowdHealth!
Pay large health care bills without insurance by joining an affordable crowdfunding community.
> I repeat: mass culture was the first AI.
Right! Seeing that relationship likely reveals something about each. AI is digitally/electronically scaled-up mass culture. Mass culture tends to exert an influence of the average of the aggregate and can hallucinate when new information and/or something outside its already-rationalized scope pops up.
I got barely a minute into the Tucker Carlson interview of Sam Altman, to where Carlson asked about the difference between lying and hallucination, and he did so with a tone like he didn't know/think there was a difference. And the fact that he asked that question right after Altman told him how the chatbot lacks its own moral agency was unintentional comedy, but of the frustrating variety. I turned off the interview.