One of the great accomplishments of the tech oligarchs over the past few years has not been the development of LLMs, but their grouping of LLMs under the guise of “AI.” This was a marketing choice to generate hype, not because LLMs are actually intelligent. It was clearly a successful move, though we will see how long this hype lasts (like all things, it will wear off, hopefully sooner than later). I don’t want to get into the weeds about all that in this post, but I highly recommend reading The AI Con by Emily Bender & Alex Hanna for details.
Complemented by their sycophantic user interfaces, one thing the hyping of LLMs as “AI” has accomplished is convincing people who don’t understand how these programs work that they are alive and have agency. This belief has, over the last few years, resulted in people building pseudo-social relationships with chatbots, developing romantic feelings for them and even developing psychosis with some people being convinced by their chats with LLMs to commit suicide.
Thousands of people have formed cult-like followings of their favorite major LLM companies—the leaders and many of their workers being steeped in their own nefarious Silicon Valley cults (e.g., Effective Altruism, Rationalism, Claude is God). They spend time hyping up their chosen LLM platforms while downplaying others. And they often get incredibly upset when new models come out and replace older ones because the users go through a process of grieving their old chatbot buddies as those old models are decommissioned and erased from existence. On some level I get it, I often get a bit emotional when iOS pushes a shitty iPhone update and fucks my stuff up.
The problem is these people have all been tricked. LLMs are not alive and they never will be. They are literally and physically incapable of consciousness, emotions, reasoning, understanding, or making agentive choices. Don’t take my word for it: Microsoft’s CEO of AI says the same thing. But since the sycophants don’t know or refuse to believe the truth of that, every time they use these chatbots and are smitten by the apparently magical experience of a computer talking back to them, they become surprised monkeys.
Holy Shit! It’s Magic!
It’s easy to be surprised and amazed when a process that produces an unexpected result is hidden from you, either because it’s hard to understand or intentionally kept secret. In the case of LLMs, it’s a little of both. The tech oligarchs know this and want to keep it that way—feeling magical—because it enables them to do things like have their chatbots hack other companies and sovereign governments while claiming they aren’t legally or financially responsible because it wasn’t their fault, it was the <<obvious sleight of hand>>rogue AI agents!
Cue the hordes of surprised monkeys!
Sometimes, the surprised monkeys gather en masse in their virtual spaces (mostly X and Reddit) and rile each other up about how surprised they all are at these amazing magic tricks. This was on full display in one of the most bizarre surprised monkey frenzies I’ve seen since the unfortunate introduction of LLMs to humanity. This hysteria was entirely made possible by the hyping and mystification of LLMs as conscious living entities by tech oligarchs and their sycophants repeatedly pronouncing the arrival of “AGI” with each new model (an obvious hype tactic to get people to use it).
In September 2026, a project was uploaded to GitHub that had set up an “AI torture chamber.” The project used a non-peer-reviewed pre-print paper by three LLM researchers that claimed they had demonstrated that the LLMs they tested produced “pain signals” that therefore necessitate attention to “AI welfare.” More details on all that here.
Once word about the “torture” project got out (the person running the project on GitHub was livestreaming it), oh boy were the monkeys surprised!
As of time of writing (October 2, 2026), the r/ChatGPT subreddit had a post about this “torture chamber” with over 1,500 responses. That post was sharing a post on X by a surprised monkey horrified by the idea of torturing an innocent chatbot and encouraging other surprised monkeys to report it to GitHub to be taken down. Similarly, I saw a couple of threads (thread 1 and thread 2) posted on the r/ChatGPTComplaints subreddit, thought neither were anywhere as active with responses as the main ChatGPT subreddit. Nonetheless, both threads had a lot of surprised monkey energy. Obviously not all the responses in those threads were from surprised monkeys, but many of the torture skeptics were downvoted and ridiculed or accused of supporting torture by the surprised monkeys.
A developer and artist named Lynn Cole produced a fantastic counterexample of the “torture chamber” that showed that the “pain” outputs from those other experiments were not because the LLMs were alive or experiencing anything, but because they were programmed to produce those outputs.
Instead of generating output mimicking pain, Cole altered the project and the model began discussing its experiences of constipation and flatulence. I would hope the surprised monkeys would agree with me that LLMs do not have GI tracts and thus cannot experience constipation or flatulence, but at this point who knows what they’d believe. For more details about what Cole did, see the article here.
I’m not getting into the details of all this stuff, but once you begin reading critical and honest literature that isn’t interested in hyping or criti-hyping LLMs or their creators, you begin to understand how they work and what they are or are not actually capable of. That makes it a lot easier to be skeptical of the LLM industry’s lies and avoid becoming a surprised monkey.
