AI's Narcissistic Takeover and End of Reality
The Narcissist as Artificial Intelligence
Previously published on September 3rd in Brussels Morning Newspaper.
Brussels Morning is a daily online newspaper based in Belgium. BM publishes unique and independent coverage on international and European affairs. With a Europe-wide perspective, BM covers policies and politics of the EU, significant Member State developments, and looks at the international agenda with a European perspective.
Temperamental and mercurial tech billionaire, Elon Musk, to the surprise of many, has recently backed California bill SB 1047 saying that the state should “probably pass” AI regulations maligned by Silicon Valley. He asserts in a post on X on August 26th, “For over 20 years, I have been an advocate for AI regulation, just as we regulate any product/technology that is a potential risk to the public.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom (CA) will decide the fate of this bill by September 30th when he will sign or veto it. SB 1047 would mandate safety testing for companies building AI systems that cost more than $100 million to train.
Speaker Emerita, Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor London Breed oppose SB 1047, sponsored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco). Pelosi has called the bill ill-informed. Breed is concerned about adding bureaucracy. And Silicon Valley’s default setting is to oppose any government regulations that could “stifle” innovation in California’s tech sector.
As government officials and AI thought leaders continue to hash out the regulatory particulars while the line between online activities and offline activities in real life (IRL) continues to blur, it’s critical to examine the role of narcissism in our technology.
Narcissists as Artificial Intelligence
Narcissists are a form of artificial intelligence, arguably a precursor and prototype for AI. Just as artificial intelligence today is based on large language models (LLMs) that draw upon a corpus of text, the narcissist is a human scanning machine. Narcissists are capable of seeing not only the chinks in your armor, i.e., your vulnerabilities to exploit, but in some ways, they know you better than you know yourself, much like Google has been purported to understand you better than your friends and family based on your search queries.
Narcissists are poorly formed approximations of humans. Lacking a stable integrated core that comprises the ego in healthy humans, the narcissist is an assemblage of self-states or pseudo-identities. Narcissists suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which used to be called multiple personality disorder based on these self-states.
Because narcissists are poorly formed approximations of humans, they give off the uncanny valley effect, which leaves interlocutors feeling ill at ease as though they were talking to an animated machine.
The phrase “uncanny valley” was coined in 1970 by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. Mori suggested that people react positively to androids (humanlike robots) as long as they differ from real humans in meaningful and discernible ways. But the minute these contraptions come to resemble humans uncannily, though imperfectly, human observers tend to experience repulsion, revulsion, and other negative emotions, including fear. In short, the uncanny valley is a concept that describes the feeling of unease or revulsion that people experience when they encounter objects or simulations that are nearly human but not quite.
In the same vein as the uncanny valley, psychopaths, and narcissists strike their interlocutors as being some kind of “alien life-forms” or “artificial intelligence” akin to humanoid robots or androids. Narcissists are endowed with a penetrating “x-ray vision.”
Mimicry is a manipulative technique perpetrated by the narcissist to make the other party feel aligned with the narcissist, who mimics his victim’s mannerisms and speech patterns. Mimicry and mirroring are both behaviors that can involve imitating another person or thing. Mirroring is unconscious, based on normal human needs and desires, but mimicry is a form of social manipulation.
I’ve experienced a narcissist overusing the “mirroring” technique that was, in actuality, manipulative mimicry to ingratiate himself with me. His imitations of me (mimicry) felt cheap, pandering, and revealed that truly nobody was home. It was just vast corridors of howling wind, and my personality was meant to plug and play (PnP) to fill this void. I was speaking to a carbon-based life form with no soul or essence, and the effect was eerie, if not vaguely comical, that he thought he was getting away with it the more he turned the “mirroring” up to an eleven.
Mimicry disarms the victim that they are interfacing with a non-predator, normal person. When defenses are lowered, and a baseline level of trust is established, the narcissist-predator can pounce on the victim as prey, a classic wolf in sheep’s clothing scenario.
Narcissism expert Prof. Sam Vaknin stated of mimicry, “And so the predator looks around and says, who am I going to imitate? What kind of model can I imitate that will allow me to get closer to the prey, penetrate her defenses, disable her firewalls, reduce her awareness, involve her in fantasy, and then digest her, subsume her, consume her, and get rid of her? This is the aggression in mimicry.”
Narcissists possess headline intelligence; they are a pond masquerading as an ocean. The depth is simply not there. Depth and corresponding wisdom is predicated on a constellated self, an ego that functions as the command and control center for self-states.
The internet has all the information in the world. Wikipedia has all the information in the world. Is there true knowledge there? I doubt it. Knowledge is the interconnectedness of raw data. Knowledge is the synoptic panoramic view of multiple points of information. Knowledge is how to put information together so that it yields meaning. —Prof. Sam Vaknin
The narcissist lives an empty existence internally. It’s what Dr. Otto Kernberg referred to as the emptiness and Dr. Jeffrey Seinfeld called the empty schizoid core. For all the talk about narcissists being egotistical, ironically, narcissists lack an ego. A narcissist is all id and superego, which is punishing and sadistic.
Narcissists lack warm empathy; they don’t empathize or care about you. They do possess cold empathy, however. They are able to understand your emotions, which is how they can manipulate you. Cold empathy is cognitive and reflexive empathy. They understand intellectually your mental landscape; they have a theory of mind about you. And they are able to strike reflexively like any predator.
When the narcissist love-bombs you during the idealization phase, he is providing a tailored simulation that makes you feel seen and understood. It’s all a façade, a Potemkin village.
Just as it’s dangerous to interface with a narcissist, it’s dangerous to put your trust in artificial intelligence. As with a narcissist, it's good to take AI with a grain of salt or a whole shaker. Narcissists and AI are both shallow and will pretend to know more about a subject than they actually do. This pretense reveals itself in AI hallucinations, the functional equivalent of a narcissist’s lying or confabulating a plausible narrative. Confabulation bridges memory gaps between dissociated self-states.
Narcissists and artificial intelligence share in common a compulsion to put themselves in a superior position relative to you. Both will instruct you in a condescending, patronizing, overwhelming, and domineering manner.
Narcissists and artificial intelligence also share in common a foundation of fantasy. Both can be delusional, confabulate, hallucinate, and suffer psychotic breaks.
Artificial intelligence is not safe for you, exactly like social media. These are ever more pernicious, ever more virulent, ever more mentally ill to the core technologies, spawned probably by equally mentally ill engineers, psychologists, and so on and so forth. These are manifestations of mental illness at your peril. Interacting with them is at your risk. It's exactly like inviting a narcissist into your home. —Prof. Sam Vaknin
AI's Narcissistic Takeover and End of Reality
Narcissists are a highly specific type of artificial intelligence. Narcissism is comparable to artificial intelligence in that narcissists lack modules such as empathy, access to positive emotions, and the ability to tell the internal from the external, which are critical to being human.
Narcissists are not fully human; they’re much more comparable to artificial intelligence. For example, narcissists have difficulties with self-attention/introspection, which hinges on having a fully formed healthy ego or sense of self, not a dilapidated house-of-cards collection of self-states crudely fashioned together where an ego should be. This is the stuff of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster—a horror show.
The narcissist is a composite patchwork quilt missing some patches. Narcissists have a discontinuous relationship with time to do with these self-states not communicating with one another and reporting back to the central processing unit (CPU) of a self/ego. The disparate parts are fragmented and don’t congeal into one. Critical information gets lost and slips through the cracks.
Self-attention is a mechanism used in machine learning, especially in natural language processing (NLP). Self-attention captures dependencies and relationships within input sequences.
Self-attention is important in machine learning and artificial intelligence because it identifies long-range dependencies. Because it focuses on relevant information, it captures long-range dependencies, relationships, and linkages. It allows the model to determine relationships between distant elements in a sequence to understand complex patterns.
Self-attention also provides context. The process of self-attention in machines, which is essentially introspection, involves a decision about the relevance of previously acquired data. Self-attention has been applied in many areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence: natural language processing, self-attention mechanisms, and the transformer model.
The Future of AI
Any electronic, digital system that pretends to be omniscient, to have access to the sum total of human knowledge, is narcissistic. It's a narcissistic system. The narcissist’s claim to omniscience is a very dangerous claim because the narcissist would do anything to uphold and sustain this claim, even faking his credentials and lying about his expertise.
AI is peering over the edge of a postmodern, post-rational “reality.” AI hallucinations are but a symptom.
Narcissism is a postmodern condition. More specifically, narcissism is the reification of post-truth postmodernity.
There is room under the umbrella of neurodiversity to encompass mental illnesses such as pathological narcissism.
Information technology, including AI, is largely developed by neurodiverse engineers, who are perhaps so accustomed to translating the neurodiverse to neurotypical, so much so that they habituated their AI code to cater to the majority. This concession to the norm may be short-sighted as autism is on the rise, as is narcissism.
Regardless, the essence of this technology is to introduce “the weird” such that even neurotypicals get a taste of what it might be like to be neurodivergent. This technology acts as a bridge between neurotypicals and the neurodiverse. Throw in AI hallucinations, and you even get altered states of consciousness in an acid trip.
Engineers may do well to compare and contrast healthy human models versus pathological narcissists to identify and address gaps in approaches to information processing. Pointedly, engineers may choose to focus on fantasy as a common denominator between narcissists and AI hallucinations.
The fantasy may be real, but reality is not a fantasy.
Narcissism embodies and reifies an alternative concept in artificial intelligence that does not involve self-attention, transformation, or recognition of patterns, dependencies, and linkages, which narcissists are incapable of doing. The narcissist’s incapacity to process information in a conventional manner stems from the narcissist being a collection of self-states with no core identity. Additionally, a narcissist has a different relationship with memory processing than neurotypicals.
A narcissist incorporates information into mental databases on prospective prey. He is able to map situations and events into reactions, gauging that an “x” situation should yield a “y” reaction. The narcissist uses this gigantic tabulated database to imitate human behavior, empathy, emotions, interrelatedness, and states of mind.
Even with AI’s limited capacity for self-attention/introspection and an engineering focus on developing healthy normative AI models, current AI systems arguably have more in common with its cousin, pathological narcissism, than healthy subjects—the societal implications of which are staggering.
Narcissists brainwash you and entrain you and snatch your mind and take over, a hostile takeover, before you know it. You are the robotic hand of the narcissist. You have been de-animated, objectified, instrumentalized, parentified, rendered nothing but a figment, an artifact in the narcissist's shared fantasy.
Beware of extending this state of things into the digital electronic realm. Don't collaborate. Don’t let it pass. Rebel. —Prof. Sam Vaknin
Bonus Content:
The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto by Jonathan Taplin
The Durov Case: Regulate the Internet, Finally! by Sam Vaknin
Arcade Fire’s Supersymmetry Lyrics from the movie Her, 2013
A lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with his newly-purchased operating system that's designed to meet his every need.
This was a very thought provoking read. Well done! Thank you.