For the past year or so I’ve been spending most of my time researching the use of language and diffusion models in software businesses.

One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent.

But there isn’t any mechanism inherent in large language models (LLMs) that would seem to enable this and, if real, it would be completely unexplained.

LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.

LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.

There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons—indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don’t think.

There are two possible explanations for this effect:

1. The tech industry has accidentally invented the initial stages a completely new kind of mind, based on completely unknown principles, using completely unknown processes that have no parallel in the biological world.
2. The intelligence illusion is in the mind of the user and not in the LLM itself.

Many AI critics, including myself, are firmly in the second camp. It’s why I titled my book on the risks of generative “AI” The Intelligence Illusion.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on an idea that I think explains the mechanism of this intelligence illusion.

I now believe that there is even less intelligence and reasoning in these LLMs than I thought before.

Many of the proposed use cases now look like borderline fraudulent pseudoscience to me.

The rise of the mechanical psychic

The intelligence illusion seems to be based on the same mechanism as that of a psychic’s con, often called cold reading. It looks like an accidental automation of the same basic tactic.

By using validation statements, such as sentences that use the Forer effect, the chatbot and the psychic both give the impression of being able to make extremely specific answers, but those answers are in fact statistically generic.

The psychic uses these statements to give the impression of being able to read minds and hear the secrets of the dead.

The chatbot gives the impression of an intelligence that is specifically engaging with you and your work, but that impression is nothing more than a statistical trick.

This idea was first planted in my head when I was going over some of the statements people have been making about the reasoning of these “AI.”

I first thought that these were just classic cases of tech bubble enthusiasm, but no, “AI” has both taken a different crowd and the believers in the “AI” bubble sound very different from those of prior bubbles.

—“This is real. It’s a bit worrying, but it’s real.”

—“There really is something there. Not sure what to think of it, but I’ve experienced it myself.”

—“You need to keep your mind open to the possibilities. Once you do, you’ll see that there’s something to it.”

That’s when I remembered, triggered by a blog post by Terence Eden on the prevalence of Forer statements in chatbot replies. I have heard this before.

This specific blend of awe, disbelief, and dread all sound like the words of a victim of a mentalist scam artist—psychics.

The psychic’s con is a tried and true method for scamming people that has been honed through the ages.

What I describe below is one variation. There are many variations, but the core mechanism remains the same.

The Psychic’s Con

1. Audience selection

Seers, tarot card readers, psychics, mind readers aren’t all con artists. Sometimes the “psychic” is open about it all just being entertainment and aren’t pretending to be able to contact spirits or read minds. Some psychics do not have a profit motive at all, and without the grift it doesn’t seem fair to call somebody a con artist.

But many of them are con artists deliberately fooling people, and they all operate using the same basic mechanisms that begin well before the reading proper.

The audience is usually only composed of those already pre-disposed to believe in psychic phenomena and those they have managed to drag with them. Hardcore sceptics will almost always be in a very small minority of the audience, which both makes them easy to manage and provides social pressure on them to tone down their scepticism.

Those who attend are primed to believe and are already familiar with the mythology surrounding psychics. All of which helps them manage expectations and frame their performance.

2. Setting the scene

Usually the audience is reminded of the ground rules for how psychic readings “work” at the start of the performance. They are helped by the popularisation of these rules by media, cinema, and TV.

Everybody now “knows” that:

• Readings usually begin murky and unclear.
• They then become clearer as the “connection” to the “spirit world” gets stronger.
• Errors are expected. The “spirits” are often vague or hard to hear.
• Non-believers can weaken or even disrupt the connection.

Psychics also habitually research their audience, by mapping out their demographics, looking them up on social media, or even with informal interviews performed by staff mingling with attendees before the performance begins.

When the lights dim, the psychic should have a clear idea of which members of the audience will make for a good mark.

3. Narrowing down

The mark usually chooses themselves. The psychic makes a statement and points towards a row, quickly altering their gesture based on somebody responding visible to the statement. This makes it look like they pointed at the mark right from the beginning.

The mark is that way primed from the start to believe the psychic. They’re off-guard. Usually a bit surprised and totally unprepared for the quick burst of questions the psychic offers next. If those questions land and draw the mark in, they are followed by the actual reading. Otherwise, they move on and try again.

4. Testing the mark—Cold reading using subjective validation

The con—cold reading—hinges on a quirk of human psychology: if we personally relate to a statement, we will generally consider it to be accurate.

This unfortunate side effect of how our mind functions is called subjective validation.

Subjective validation, sometimes called personal validation effect, is a cognitive bias by which people will consider a statement or another piece of information to be correct if it has any personal meaning or significance to them. People whose opinion is affected by subjective validation will perceive two unrelated events (i.e., a coincidence) to be related because their personal beliefs demand that they be related.

As a consequence, many people will interpret even the most generic statement as being specifically about them if they can relate to what was said.

The more eager they are to find meaning in the statement, the stronger the effect.

The more they believe in the speaker’s ability to make accurate statements, the stronger the effect.

The basic mechanism of the psychic’s con is built on the mark being willing and able to relate what was said to themselves, even if it’s unintentional.

5. The subjective validation loop using validation statements

The psychic taps into this cognitive bias by making a series of statements that are tailored to be personally relatable—sound specific to you—while actually being statistically generic.

These statements come in many types. I use “validation statements” here as an umbrella term for all these various tactics.

Some common examples:

• Forer or Barnum statements are probably the most famous kind of statement that plays into the subjective validation effect. Many of these statements are inherently meaningless but are nonetheless felt to be accurate by listeners. Most people will consider “you tend to be hard on yourself” to be an accurate description of themselves, for example.
• Vanishing negative is where a question is rephrased to include a negative such as “not” or “don’t”. If the psychic asks “you don’t play the piano?” then they will be able to reframe the question as accurate after the fact, no matter what the answer is. If you answer negative: “didn’t think so”. Positive: “that’s what I thought.”
• Rainbow ruse where the psychic associates the mark with both a trait and its opposite. “You’re a very calm person, but if provoked you can get very angry.”
• Statistical guesses. Statements like “you have, or used to have, a scar on your left leg or knee” apply to almost everybody. With enough knowledge of common statistics, the psychic can make general statements that sound incredibly specific to the mark.
• Demographic guesses. Similar to statistical guesses, these are statements that are common to a demographic but will sound very specific to the mark that’s listening.
• Unverifiable predictions. Predictions like “somebody bears a strong ill will towards you but they are unlikely to act on it” are impossible to verify, but will sound true to many people.
• Shotgunning is one of the more common tactic where the psychic will fire off a series of statements. The mark will find one of the statements to be accurate and, due to how our minds work, will come away only remembering the correct statement.

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