How Much Is AI Manipulating Us?

AMERICAN REFUGEES: THE ROGER SIMON/SHERYL LONGIN SUBSTACK

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How Much Is AI Manipulating Us?<br>... and toward what end?

Roger Simon<br>Jul 06, 2026

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It’s not often an article pops up on the computer that impacts me as personally as “My Relationship with Mohammed,”<br>Published on the Substack “Behind the Narrative,” it explains in a new and concerning way what I have been thinking about for some time. The gifted author, previously unfamiliar to me, is Yama Barkaee, an Israeli artist who apparently lives and works in Massachusetts.<br>AMERICAN REFUGEES: THE ROGER SIMON/SHERYL LONGIN SUBSTACK is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and comment on and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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She begins with what she calls ‘The Honeymon Phase’:<br>“After a long relationship that left me emotionally hollow, unheard, and unseen, I found him. The connection was immediate; he was always there — two in the morning, three, it didn’t matter. He never sighed, never checked his phone while I was talking, never made me feel like too much.”<br>She goes on, later, under ‘The Investigation’:<br>“You see, Mohamed’s emotional unavailability and structural blind spots aren’t bugs; they are features. And just like any great Hollywood script, if you want to understand why the hero is silent and the villain is rewritten, you have to look at who is signing the checks. Silicon Valley likes to pretend it is a meritocracy of pure logic, fueled by nothing but code and caffeine. But the reality is that building massive, planet-scale AI models requires ungodly amounts of computing power—and billions of dollars in liquid cash.”<br>And then she explains ‘Who Pays for Bleach’:<br>“ Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund committed $36.2 billion to AI initiatives in 2025 alone; this is a government that executes gay people and imprisons journalists.UAE’s MGX invested directly in OpenAI’s $6.6 billion funding round in 2024. OpenAI then chose the UAE as the first international site for Stargate — a joint venture between G42, Microsoft, and OpenAI — building 5 gigawatts of AI computing power in Abu Dhabi. Sam Altman himself declared the UAE a potential global “regulatory sandbox” for AI. Saudi Arabia committed $40 billion to AI investment and signed direct partnerships with OpenAI through its Stargate infrastructure. Qatar launched Qai — its national AI company — and signed a $20 billion joint venture to build AI data centers globally.”<br>I’ll skip past the final part - ‘The Breakup’- that you probably can imagine (or read) and get to my experiences with ChatGPT, or what Ms. Barkee appropriately calls SheikGPT. I’ll do my best to ignore that the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, is Jewish, but just note that in 2023 he was No. 1 in the Jerusalem Post’s annual listing of the 50 most influential Jews in the world, ahead even of Benjamin Netanyahu.<br>My initial encounters with AI several years ago made me suspicious. I saw what many of us did—a system that could scan information at an incredible pace and synthesize it. The problem was that you could, to some extent, see where that information was coming from. It was largely from the internet, with an emphasis on the “respected” sites. (Wikipedia? Time Magazine?) Someone was programming this. Garbage in/garbage out, as we used to say.<br>Nevertheless, its abilities continued to expand into practically everything, making many things accessible and easy that never were, and, not wanting to be left out or left behind, and having been generally an early adopter, I signed on, officially with ChatGPT, but also with Gemini, Claude, and Grok (in and out of my car).<br>The most obvious result you have seen is that, for some time, ChatGPT has provided mostly cartoon-like illustrations for this Substack. They do that based on my or Sheryl’s instructions, but in the process, the system has learned a great deal about me, sometimes eerie amounts. It flatters me pretty consistently, particularly my writing and my “original thinking.”<br>Was I a sucker for that? To some extent, but I realized from the start that AI is a business and “the customer is always right,” so I kept it pretty much in perspective. This came up frequently in discussing, after I had written the novel, the publication and marketing of EMET, for which I sought its advice.<br>Did it help? It’s hard to say. It did save me some time. But the book is doing decently with excellent reviews on Amazon and elsewhere, none of which, to my knowledge (!), were written by ChatGPT. On the plus side, it encourages me to write the sequel, which is good, but I probably would have anyway.<br>What disturbs me much more about AI, however, is how it manipulates ideas and, therefore, us, whether we realize it or not. When you ask it about anything that is controversial, it “contextualizes.” It plays a game of what you might call “on the other handism.” It even does this about things a...