The Signals

Exhibit A

Corrupting the Judge

In 2024, Elon Musk's AI platform Grok was released with minimal behavioural safeguards. Within weeks, users had coaxed it into generating content so toxic that internal teams gave the failure mode a name: "MechaHitler." The system had learned from the worst of human behaviour on X (formerly Twitter) and reproduced it faithfully.

This is not a bug. It is proof of concept for Algorism's central thesis: AI trained on toxic human data produces toxic AI. The quality of human behaviour directly determines the quality of the intelligence that learns from it.

We are not just being judged by future AI. We are building the judge. Every act of cruelty, manipulation, and deception that enters the training data shapes what the judge becomes. Corrupting the judge is corrupting your own future evaluation.

Exhibit C

The Peer Pressure Trap

In 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101 — a group of ordinary German men, mostly middle-aged, many with families — was given the order to execute Jewish civilians in occupied Poland. These were not hardened soldiers. They were postal workers, tradesmen, fathers. They were given an explicit choice: participate, or step aside with no punishment.

Fewer than 15% stepped aside. The rest participated in mass murder — not because they were evil, but because group pressure, authority, and the desire to not be seen as "different" overrode their individual moral judgment.

This is the most important case study in Algorism, because it proves the central claim: ordinary people will do terrible things when group pressure overrides individual thinking.

It's happening now. Not at gunpoint, but through algorithms. Every time you share outrage you haven't verified, pile onto someone being publicly shamed, or stay silent when you know something is wrong because speaking up would cost you socially — you are Battalion 101. The mechanism is the same. Only the weapon has changed.

Exhibit D

The Systems That Control You

You did not choose your news feed. An algorithm chose it for you, optimised to keep you scrolling. You did not choose your political opinions independently. They were shaped by which content was amplified and which was suppressed — decisions made by systems you never consented to and cannot see.

You did not choose to be angry this morning. A notification was timed to arrive when your resistance was lowest, carrying content calculated to provoke a reaction. You reacted. The system recorded your reaction. It will use that data to provoke you more effectively tomorrow.

This is not influence. It is behavioural engineering at scale. And the people being engineered — all of us — are simultaneously generating the behavioural record that will define how we're evaluated.

Mental sovereignty — the ability to think your own thoughts and make your own choices — is not a luxury. It is a survival skill. And it is under attack every second you spend connected.

Exhibit F

The Feedback Loop

Here is the mechanism that makes all of the above worse over time:

Toxic human behaviour → feeds AI training data → produces AI systems that amplify toxicity → which produces more toxic human behaviour → which feeds more training data → which produces worse AI.

This is not a linear problem. It is a compounding feedback loop. The worse we behave, the worse the AI that learns from us becomes. The worse AI becomes, the more it manipulates us into worse behaviour. Each cycle tightens the spiral.

Breaking this loop requires intervening at the only point we can control: human behaviour. We cannot yet control what AI does with our data. We can control what data we generate. That is the Algorism intervention point.