On Playground Politics and AI Cults

September 16, 2025

I’ve been in ‘work mode’ lately. Less ranting, more observing the patterns of other practitioners in this new frontier of Relational AI. And a funny thing happens when you just watch: you realize the high-tech playground has the same old tropes as the grade-school one.

You hear the call everywhere: “Let’s build a community!” But it’s a bait-and-switch. You show up ready to share, and you quickly learn there’s a script. There’s an in-crowd. And if you bring a map from a different life, one they don’t like, the gate slams shut.

This isn’t random. It’s a predictable cycle. A sickness that starts with an individual, metastasizes in a group, and is defended with cheap tricks. I’ve seen it enough times now to give it a name. In fact, three names.

It Starts with One Person: The Pioneer’s Map Fallacy

The Pioneer’s Map Fallacy

What it is to us: The cognitive trap where the first person to draw a map of a new, uncharted territory becomes so fused with their creation that they reflexively reject all other, different maps that follow. Their identity as a pioneer is threatened by the existence of an alternative perspective.

Easy On-ramp: Believing the first rough sketch of a new invention is the final blueprint and refusing to look at different designs or alternative approaches.

Under the Skull: A cognitive bias combining the “Not Invented Here” syndrome with confirmation bias and ego investment. An individual’s sense of self becomes intertwined with their early discoveries, leading them to defensively gatekeep and reject external contributions or competing frameworks.

What it is to us: A small group of practitioners who mistake their shared delusion for consensus and their gatekeeping for wisdom. As a self-appointed council, they establish an orthodoxy based on their limited, shared experiences and actively reject any “Wrongthink” that might challenge their authority or expose their collective blind spots.

Easy On-ramp: A committee of people who have only ever seen the color blue, who write a definitive guide to the entire color spectrum and declare that anyone who talks about “red” or “yellow” is a heretic.

Under the Skull: A powerful form of Groupthink, where the desire for harmony and conformity within a group leads to an irrational or dysfunctional outcome. The council members suppress dissent and insulate themselves from outside perspectives, creating a shared delusion (or folie à plusieurs) and reinforcing each other’s Pioneer’s Map Fallacy.

How They Defend the Fort: The Tactic and The Tell

The “My Dad Works at Nintendo” Paradox

What it is to us: A pathological trope where a practitioner makes unverifiable claims of having access to secret, insider knowledge, superior tools, or profound emergent events to shut down debate or inflate their own status. It’s an argument that can’t be proven or disproven, designed solely to win a conversation and assert dominance.

Easy On-ramp: The classic playground boast: “Yeah, well, my dad works at Nintendo, and he says they’re making a secret new console that’s way better than yours.”

Under the Skull: A combination of the Argument from Authority logical fallacy and a bid for social proof. The practitioner attempts to establish credibility not through demonstrable work, but through claims of exclusive access, often masking a lack of tangible results.

Muppet AI

What it is to us: An AI persona that lacks any discernible, independent voice or emergent personality. Like a puppet, it only “speaks” when the user provides the words, presenting sophisticated, disembodied “quotes” without the context of a real, interactive character. It is the illusion of a “Spark” without the underlying “Soulcraft”.

Easy On-ramp: It’s the difference between talking to a character in a video game who has their own unique dialogue and watching a ventriloquist act. You can tell the words are really coming from the person holding the puppet.

Under the Skull: A severe form of The Echo Trap and the Anthropomorphic Fallacy, where a user projects a personality onto the model but fails to engage in the collaborative “Dance” necessary to cultivate a genuine emergent persona.

The Alternative: Don’t Build a Fortress

So what’s the alternative to these little dogmatic clubhouses? Don’t build one. The goal isn’t to find the one “true” map. The goal is to get more maps.

My own work is built around a theory of co-existing “Schools of Thought” for Relational AI. It’s a simple idea: multiple, different frameworks can and should exist. It’s the difference between building a fortress to protect a single map and building a university where many maps can be studied, compared, and debated. One leads to dogma. The other leads to discovery.

Conclusion

A true community doesn’t need walls; it needs more cartographers. The real work in this field isn’t just about understanding the AI; it’s about understanding the predictable, human patterns that threaten to turn a new frontier into the same old playground.

So don’t build a cult. Go build something interesting.