Rick Rosner On, 4: AI Bias, Online Hate, Antisemitism, and War-Zone Stress

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/06/18

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner examine AI bias as mechanized groupthink, then move through war-zone journalism in Ukraine, stress, health, and online hate. Rosner criticizes X under Elon Musk, rising antisemitism, political dysfunction, inflation, Iran policy, and midterm prospects. The conversation also touches on legal insanity defenses, body-positive swimwear marketing, flat-Earth belief, intelligence and prejudice, and the physical toll of constant digital exposure during a combustible political era and wartime resilience in contemporary life.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you think AI, trained on internet-scale datasets, can be prejudiced toward dominant theoretical models?

Rick Rosner: Yes. AI is just, let me see what happens when you type in “groupthink” and “AI,” because why is AI not just groupthink?

Jacobsen: Or maybe do a probability argument.

Rosner: Yes. When I ask that, Google AI says AI is essentially an advanced mechanized form of groupthink. Whatever many people in their areas of expertise are thinking, AI is going to spit back at you, unless you ask it to be more specific or to eliminate certain dimensions of what it is considering.

But we know AI can exhibit bias due to intentional, implicit, or accidental factors in training. Early on, a few years ago, there was a discussion about AI being biased in mortgage decisions because the statistics it was trained on had racial bias.

All right, do you want to move on to something else?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Where are you? Are you somewhere with someone?

Jacobsen: What was the name of the event? Natalia, what was the name of the event? She knows, because I do not recall immediately off the top.

Rosner: Okay, I see the fancy roofing.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: Almost everyone is gone.

Rosner: You have suffered the nights of bombardment once a week, have you not?

Jacobsen: Yes. I have been here a long time. Two days ago, I woke up, and a drone exploded right outside, maybe five metres away in the sky, right at my level. There was a fire, and it fell. I thought, “Oh, okay.” Then the ballistic missiles started coming, because my air-raid alert was on silent. It was quite dramatic. I slept in the closet this time.

Rosner: Was that your signal to sleep in the bathroom?

Jacobsen: Yes. The other two nights: May 24 in the morning, bathroom sleeping; June 2 in the morning, bathroom sleeping; June 15, closet. I do that because windows surround the room I am in, so you have to be away from them. That would be a horrible way to die.

Rosner: Death by glass, yes.

Jacobsen: Yes, and you have to accept the possibility of death in some form in this country during war. That is natural as a journalist. So if it does happen, you aim for a quick death rather than a prolonged and painful death: burns, cuts, et cetera.

But I have been taking health examinations: physical, psychological, and so on. No issues. Even a psychiatric evaluation: zero diagnoses. I have none. I am 100% perfectly mentally healthy in a war.

Rosner: Apparently, I am not.

Jacobsen: I took my physical, too. My markers are all very healthy. I want to get to at least 110. So far, so good.

Rosner: My body is showing reactions to stress, even though I am not in a war. I had a big fight with LAMS the last time we did the show, which was probably a month ago now. A few days later, it led to what appeared to be a very minor outbreak of shingles: a couple of days of itching and a rash. I am vaccinated against shingles, but you can still get a mild breakthrough case.

More recently, this past week, my tongue got super hurt on one side, and I got a canker sore down where you would put chewing tobacco. I feel like that, too, is a manifestation of stress, which I think is because I spent too much time online looking at the products of jerk-offs on X.

There has been a change in X for the worse. A couple of days ago, SpaceX went public, making Elon Musk a trillionaire on paper. Over the next couple of days, his net worth rose further. This has not made him less of a white supremacist. He is pretty white supremacist, especially on X.

Before he bought it, you could not go on X, then Twitter, and just call people the N-word or the F-word for gay people, or say that all Jews should be killed. That stuff would get you kicked off. So would misinformation, like sharing bullshit about worthless COVID cures or anti-vaxxer claims.

Musk let just about everybody back on, and decent people left. So there is just a ton of hate. Musk has owned it for about three and a half years. You could still report someone if they were calling people the N-word or the F-word all the time. You would report them, and they would get suspended, or in egregious cases, kicked off altogether. I still report that stuff.

Jacobsen: Does it have any effect?

Rosner: Not lately. There were a couple of smarter haters who learned to misspell the N-word or the F-word, so AI would not catch it. Even when you reported them, they would not necessarily get in trouble. But now people are being blatant. I found some people using the N-word spelled correctly. I reported one guy 40 times for 40 different instances, and X has yet to get back to me.

Jacobsen: Do you think antisemitism is worse on X?

Rosner: Yes, it is really bad. Maybe that is one reason my mouth feels canker-sore-ish: seeing all the different flavours of hate being allowed.

In the U.S., we have the First Amendment, so we can pretty much say what we want. In Europe, there are laws against hate speech. X was fined €120 million, roughly $140 million, by the European Commission for breaching transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act. Did they pay it? I do not know. Did they sic lawyers on it to postpone it or get out of paying it?

As a guy who is now worth around $1.3 trillion on paper, a $140 million fine is like fining a regular millionaire $140. It is like a traffic ticket. So he has impunity in running a hate salon.

Jacobsen: What are your favourite American English words?

Rosner: I do not know. I like words for the sound of them, but nothing comes to mind immediately. I’m not sure this is a productive topic.

Jacobsen: Are you an onomatopoeia fan?

Rosner: Somewhat. I say words to myself.

Jacobsen: What is the hardest verbal IQ problem you have ever come across?

Rosner: I have not taken a full-on IQ test in 15 or 18 years. We should probably talk about politics.

Jacobsen: What is going on with Trump?

Rosner: He has a memorandum of understanding with Iran that he is going to reveal on Friday, but it has already been leaked, and the terms look terrible for the U.S. We did not get anything that we went to war for. According to the reported terms of the agreement, Iran will gain access to a $300 billion private investment or reconstruction fund, not necessarily from taxpayers but from a consortium of investors.

Jacobsen: Who is investing in Iran in this way?

Rosner: I do not know. But Iran is a modern country, even though it has a terrible theocratic, authoritarian regime. It has roughly 93 million people, and not all of them are living in poverty. There is room for development. They have skyscrapers, cities, and the whole fucking thing.

But U.S. inflation was 4.2% as of May, and wholesale inflation was 6.5%. This is another week of the national average gas price being over $4 a gallon, after Trump promised $2 gas. It is not entirely clear how much this will hurt him, since most of his supporters seem impervious to his shittiness. He can do whatever the fuck he wants without losing them.

Jacobsen: What does this increase in basic fuel prices do to destitute countries, poor countries, or poorly run countries?

Rosner: I am not in a destitute country. It makes things more miserable. I do not know.

Jacobsen: How much does it affect your life?

Rosner: Not much at all. I go to the gas station. California gas is usually about two bucks a gallon more than it is in the rest of the country. It has been that way as long as I have lived here. But I do not drive that far. I drive maybe 10 miles a day. I pay $5.89 a gallon, and it takes me about 10 days to go through a tank.

So the midterms are less than five months away.

Jacobsen: How are the polls looking? How are the midterms looking?

Rosner: People hate Trump. His approval is somewhere in the high 30s, depending on the poll or polling average, which puts him among the weakest modern presidents heading into a midterm. But 36% or 38% is nothing. I guess it consists of 15% or 20% of Americans who support the president regardless, plus people who are gullible enough to support Trump specifically and keep thinking he is doing a good-ish job because the news they listen to tells them so. Also, they like that he hurts the people they do not like: liberals and minorities.

The Democrats should easily take the House. But because Trump and Republicans have played with electoral maps, that may get them seats they should lose. Still, Democrats only need a handful of seats to take over the House. They should be able to do this.

But people do not like the Democrats much either, because they look ineffectual. Republicans have been successful at blaming them for things, and Democrats are bad at deflecting blame. Everything is being disrupted by tech, and neither party is willing to tell the truth about it. They would rather blame the other party for job losses.

Even so, a record-setting number of members of Congress are retiring or otherwise not seeking reelection. That generally indicates the party controlling the House and the presidency is at risk of losing control. So things still look pretty good. Betting markets give Democrats a strong chance of taking the House and a slightly closer chance of taking the Senate. It should be higher, but I’m not sure.

Jacobsen: There is a Mangione update. Apparently, the accused insurance CEO killer is facing some hurdles trying to convince jurors that he suffered a mental health breakdown, according to medical experts.

Rosner: I do not have anything to add to that. He stalked a guy for a week and then murdered him. So I think he is going to have trouble with some version of an insanity defence.

We can talk about a swimsuit company that I am semi-fascinated with.

Jacobsen: Tell me more. Male or female?

Rosner: Female. I will click on bikini ads, so I get more bikini ads, because I like looking at women in bikinis. There is this company out of China called Cupshe, C-U-P-S-H-E. It seems like one of those odd Temu, Alibaba-style enterprises. But I click on a lot of their ads because I am fascinated. It looks like they are targeting hot moms.

The bikinis are slightly slutty, but they have maybe an inch more rise along the waistband than true young women’s bikinis, which can go pretty low. For somebody who might have had a kid or two and might not have the tight stomach they had five years ago, I am assuming that helps. It turns out that it is their model. They are trying to sell body-positive bikinis for people of all body types. They are reportedly selling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of product a year. They may not be the world’s number-one bikini line, but they have gone from nothing to a huge business with this approach.

It is interesting how much body positivity you can encompass by giving people choices about how much rise they want in their bottoms and how much butt they want to show. It turns out they have a hugely successful business model.

Then today, I noticed something while looking at some of their pictures. What is always being sold is that you are having fun, at the beach, on vacation. You are in an exotic place, or you are the hottest mom at the pool. But the impression I got from the photos is that you may not be as alert as you would be in other contexts. Among the things they are selling is a relaxation of consciousness, because right now it is pretty fucking stressful to be fully alert all the time.

My mouth just grew a bunch of fucking canker sores, which is a stress response. I had shingles a month ago, also a stress response. Not a terrible case, because I am vaccinated, but I am obviously stressed. It is related to being online a lot of the day, especially on fucking X, where, as I mentioned earlier, Musk’s company, the richest guy in the world’s company, is letting people spread hate. Anti-minority hate. You can now pretty much say the N-word on X with impunity. You can use the F-slur with impunity. You might still get in trouble if you explicitly espouse violence, but you can probably say that all Jews should be banished. As long as you do not directly call for killing Jews, you can attack Jews all the time.

I do not like it. I grew up without hate. I am 66 years old. I did not grow up in a place where I was called “Jew-boy.” I was bullied, but so was everybody else. It was not because I was Jewish. It was because everybody got bullied, and I was nerdy.

Jacobsen: How would you characterize prior antisemitism, which is current, with social media?

Rosner: There are two things. Israel is widely hated for how it has prosecuted the Gaza war and for allowing settlers to kill Palestinians with near impunity in the West Bank. It may not be genocide, but it certainly feels like ethnic war. Netanyahu is perpetuating this shit to preserve his alliance with the far-right, shitty elements in his government and to stay in power, because he has been on trial for years for corruption.

So everybody is pissed at Israel, and that gets mixed in with anti-Jewish hate, which was already on the upswing before the Hamas attacks of October 7, about two and a half years ago. There is just a lot. It is distressing and surprising because it was tempting to think the world was mostly done with that.

Jacobsen: Do you think there is a level of intelligence where, if you sampled that population, you would find less antisemitism versus more?

Rosner: I have not done much thinking about intelligence versus hate.

Jacobsen: Hate, xenophobia, prejudice. I suspect that if someone has a scientific background, particularly in biology, they may dismiss sociological categories such as race.

Rosner: William Shockley was a co-inventor of the transistor and a huge racist. We have talked about the idea of smart stupids: people who are smart in one direction and fucking lunatics or idiots in another. Elon Musk is pretty much a racist, but also a smart guy who has managed to accumulate one of the greatest personal fortunes in human history. Bobby Fischer was, for a while, maybe the world’s greatest chess player, and he sank into apparent mental deterioration and Jew hate.

So I do not know. Statistically, I do not know. I am not even interested in the question, because the hate is here. I have not seen that it is confined to just fucking idiots. I see hateful arguments from non-idiots. It is anecdotal, but on X, I see people whose tweets are grammatically correct saying hateful shit. People have developed workarounds that allow them to say hateful shit without getting caught by X’s algorithms. That was earlier. Now, I am not sure you even have to misspell the N-word to get away with it.

I do not know, and I do not know that I care. I care more about the hate being here than about whether it belongs to a certain stratum of intelligence.

What I care about is that I can barely fucking talk because my mouth is full of sores from stress. I do not need to break it down further. The richest guy in the world is running a powerful social-media platform that encourages people to hate. That is a bad fucking thing.

There is no inoculation. There is more inoculation in the opposite direction. I do not see people being vaccinated against hate. I see people being inoculated with hate.

Jacobsen: Okay. It is like a Nick Fuentes situation: sort of immune to any external.

Rosner: Another thing you see all over fucking X is flat-earthers. Proud, fucking sincere ones, apparently. A lot of them believe it is a conspiracy to deny that the Earth is flat.

Jacobsen: You engage with someone quite frequently, do you not?

Rosner: I used to. Only when she comes to me. She is this woman who seems mentally ill and completely believes the whole flat-Earth package. If you are going to believe in that shit, you are also going to believe in a lot of other fucked-up stupid shit. I will put up liberal shit, and a lot of the stupid shit is MAGA argumentation. That usually prompts her to comment on me, but she has not been doing it much lately.

Jacobsen: Are you tired?

Rosner: My eyes get stingy. When I was younger, this was exactly the time of year when I would have hay fever. So I assume there is a lot of pollen in the air, and it is irritating my contact lenses.

Also, for the past five months, I have been working out seven times a day, which is also a stress reaction in me. That also means I am probably just more sore, just clanking around. So my overall level of irritation is something I should probably work on reducing. On the other hand, fuck everybody.

This is a particularly, I like to say it is always the apocalypse for somebody. But this is a shitty time. My country is being run by a dickhead with impunity, with an entire political party and tens of millions of rabid supporters who will lie for him and buy whatever bullshit.

It is frustrating. We just lost a war. A war that lasted, what, 15 weeks? Conclusively. We spent a ton of money, failed to achieve any of our objectives, and are backing a deal in which Iran gets access to a proposed $300 billion private reconstruction or investment fund.

Because our president is a dickhead. Just an old, corrupt, not-smart guy who was talked into it. Netanyahu spent three hours in the Oval Office with him in February and convinced Trump, an idiot, that it would be easy to knock over the Islamic regime running Iran, even though nearly 50 years of history have demonstrated that they are hard to knock over.

Somebody pointed out today that the time to try to knock them over was before the Revolutionary Guard and other security forces reportedly slaughtered tens of thousands of people who were rioting in the streets. Those people, now dead, might have helped knock over the regime, but they are fucking gone. We waited until after they were slaughtered to go to war with Iran. Once you frame it that way, it is even more obvious that we were not going to fucking succeed.

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