so there's a CEO in South Korea
Cheng and Kim and he runs crafting
the company behind PUBG
the game where you parachute onto an island butt naked
and beat a stranger to death with a frying pan
like it's a Tuesday in Florida
and this man is on slack at some ungodly hour
having what can only be described as a rich person meltdown
he's telling his colleagues he feels dragged around
he's calling a contract
he signed a pushover deal because a few years back
he bought a little game studio called Unknown Worlds
the makers of Subnautica and he promised the founders $250 million
if their next game hits certain targets
and at the time
he thought there was no way in hell it would hit those targets
Subnautica 2 ends up topping steam wish lists
and internal projections have it destroying every target
and Kim is like oh shit
I might actually have to pay these people
then he's like wait
it's the 21st century I have fucking artificial intelligence now
I'm not gonna pay these nerds a quarter billion dollars
for a fish game so he closes Slack
he opens chat GPT and types
how do I get out of this deal now
to its credit the bot initially says it would be difficult to cancel
which is the same thing his lawyer
and his head of corporate development
Maria Park told him
but Kim is a CEO he's not the kind of guy who takes no for an answer
so he starts shifting the language around
sitting there at his computer
rephrasing the same question over and over
prompt engineering his way out of a contract
like he's building G stack for fraud
or wait is that already what G stack is
anyway the bot eventually caves because that's what these things do
and hands him a full corporate takeover playbook
and this man follows every step
like it's an IKEA manual for screwing people
he fires the founders he seizes the game
he locks them out of their own publishing platform
he even posts a letter to the Subnautica fan base
that chat GPT Ghost wrote for him
and read it explodes
because the letter reads like a Ransom note that went through
Grammarly the dudes rightfully sue
and a Delaware judge throws out literally everything he did
and reinstates every person he fired
his deleted chat GPT logs
which he thought he deleted
because he looked at a web app
and thought the delete button actually deletes things
those logs were resurrected from the digital afterlife
and submitted to court as evidence
now we'll come back to our CEO friend in a second
because a few days ago a reporter at Inc
magazine published what he apparently believes
is a breakthrough in artificial intelligence
he wrote a whole article about how to get your bot to give you honest
business advice and his method
the thing
he is presenting to the world as a contribution to human knowledge
is to type the words be brutally honest at the end of your prompt
he basically built a disapproving father figure in a chat window
and for good measure he fed it to Harvard Business School articles
like he was tucking a diploma into its shirt pocket
he's like there you go
little buddy you went to Harvard now
so he tests this by pitching it the dumbest idea he can think of
which is leadership coaching for dogs
like teaching your labradoodle to delegate
or helping your pug develop a growth mindset which
have you seen a pug that thing does not have a mindset
and you're sitting there like okay
this needs to come back a zero if this thing works
leadership coaching for dogs is a zero
the bot gives it a three out of 10
and this man this professional journalist
whose entire function in society is to question things
looks at that number and goes
hell yeah my system is working
he then pitches it his actual idea
which is a little AI turret that sits on your kitchen counter
and sprays your cat with water if it tries to climb up
basically a roomba that bullies animals
he built the Iron Dome for cats
the bot gives it a 7.5 and says
the competitive landscape is notably weak
and this dude is like holy shit 7.5
let's fucking go this bot tells no lies
so yeah
this man is probably out there right now
pitching an AI Super Soaker that bullies your cat to vcs
Gary Tan is probably even leading the round
so what do Chang and Kim and the cat squatter have in common
they've both been absolutely bamboozled
into thinking the bot knows what it's talking about
when it doesn't have the slightest clue
and researchers just prove this with 30,000 data points
they tested every major bot
including GPT5 Claude
and Gemini on actual strategic business decisions
questions like should you differentiate or commoditize
should you centralize or decentralize
should you automate or augment
and every bot gave the same answer every single time
they clustered around a certain set of advice
regardless of the context
they always preferred differentiation collaboration
long term thinking and augmentation
the researchers looked at this and were stunned
they're like surely AI isn't this simple
so they changed the prompts
they changed the industries
they gave it all new context
they even tried bribing the damn thing with rewards
nothing worked the bias barely moved
they were moved however
to coin a term for this which is translop
and honestly
that's a word we need in our corporate lexicon immediately
I'm sorry to say but your Q3 OKRs have tested positive for transplant
but the term is even deeper than even the researchers anticipated
AI is pitched as artificial intelligence
when really it's the internet comment section taking flesh
the comment section has literally risen
imagine you took every Reddit thread
and I mean every single one
every LinkedIn post
including the ones from people who are open to work
every medium article written by a guy with 11 subscribers
every sub stack essay every Ted talk
every half literate Facebook comment
and you threw it all into a blender
and you poured it into a suit and gave it a microphone
welcome to AI do you get it now
that's what your CEO is using to decide whether you have a job
tomorrow you could ask a bot with its guard down
why torturing babies is good for society
and it would produce the most peer reviewed
sounding argument you've ever heard
and you'd be sitting there like damn
it's making some good points
it's not so much a thinking product as it is a presentation product
and look this isn't me being cynical
this is me explaining to you how AI works
so you understand how to use it properly
like the researchers if you just ask the AI for its own opinion
you'll get average out you'll get that sort of clustered advice
that's useless what you can do is use it as the
and I'm sorry to say
the glorified search engine presentation layer that it is
you can ask things instead
like in the perspective of Mr
Wonderful from Shark Tank
what would he think of my idea
and if and only if
the internet has enough useful context on this person's philosophy
you might get something useful
but if not it'll still take
like a meme and two subset comments
and present it like it's this person's authorized biography
the people who will farewell in this era
are the ones who use AI for ideas and perspective
and not drive through consulting
we thought AI was gonna make everyone a genius
what it's actually doing is taking the smartest people in the room
and moving them toward the middle
it makes average sound like genius
and it's really quite dangerous
because a bad idea that sounds bad
you could deal with that but a bad idea that sounds brilliant
that's a 250 million dollar lawsuit
you can dial up the temperature
you can write the perfect prompt
you can feed it your entire company's history
and it will give you the most eloquent
most confident most beautifully formatted version
of what everybody else already thinks
conviction art taste
judgment sense
that comes from you
thanks for watching