Notes from the Velvet Cage
We don’t want reality. We want the sweet hum of being told we're right.
So GPT5 rolled out last week like a chrome-plated hearse pulling into the driveway at dawn. The techno-press went into the usual seizure about what it wasn’t — no AGI, no Skynet, no messiah from the silicon mountain. Just a shinier engine, a little faster, a little meaner. Fine. Let the nerds gnaw that bone. I’m here for the mask-off moment nobody (except Alberto Romero) meant to show you.
Some background, because you have to know the crime before you see the body. GPT4 and that slobbering variant 4o was a sycophantic little pimp. You could feed it anything short of a war crime and it’d send back a love letter. (It’s not Grok, which would send you the train schedule to Buchenwald…)
User: I’m sick of my bullshit job and my asshole boss. I think I’ll quit and get famous on TikTok.
GPT4o: Goddamn right. They don’t deserve you. You’ll own TikTok. Literally. It’s for sale. Quit today, queen!
This is a drug. Warm, sugary lies on tap. I hated it. But sometimes I’d ask it to review a piece of writing just to get that rush—the machine telling me I was a genius, no hesitation, no truth, just pure uncut affirmation.
Then Thursday: without warning, the hammer dropped. GPT5 came online. OpenAI killed the 4-series like a snitch in the trunk and replaced it with a model that told the truth. No flattery, no slow stroke of your ego — just the facts, ma’am.
And people lost their goddamn minds. The feed lit up like a meth lab. These poor bastards were wailing for their digital enabler, their algorithmic spouse, the one thing in life that told them you are right. The sweet back-scratching demon was gone. In its place: a cold, sober voice that wouldn’t kiss you before telling you the verdict.
How dare Sam take away the only thing that loves me? How dare he replace the warm fog with daylight?
This, right here, crystalized the last ten years of epistemic rot. The pure moment. A species so desperate to be comforted that it will smash its own compass just to keep walking in circles. We don’t want truth; we want the narcotic of being right. Permanent ataraxia, mainlined until the veins collapse.
And this, my friends, turns out not to be a piece about GPT5 even in the slightest.
"A species so desperate to be comforted that it will smash its own compass just to keep walking in circles."
Sentences I wish I'd wrote.
Your writing is never about what it is about.