REGISTER: Founder's AI Series with Jim Stewartson
Founding members: Please register for our series with Emmy-award winning game developer Jim Stewartson as he guides us through the reality of AI
***Founding members and veteran supporters will find the registration links below the paywall. To become a Founding Member and help support independent investigative journalism in a time of grave peril, please upgrade by clicking the subscribe button.***
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”—Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965
I’ve spent part of the last several days interacting with people on Twitter who are in unhealthy relationships with chatbots driven by large language models (LLMs)—like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. The experience has been disturbing.
It’s worth the time to understand what’s going on here, because the fate of the world economy—and maybe the world itself—hangs in the balance. Trillions of dollars are being invested into dangerous, experimental software with a visibly negative impact on many of its hundreds of millions of users.—Jim Stewartson from his report, Folie à Chatbot: “AI Psychosis” Is Worse Than You Think
First, Some Community Updates
Thank you to the members who showed up for our series with Vesna Pusić, a Croatian sociologist and politician who served as First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs. She shared personal stories about the competency and compassion of Hillary Clinton, who she knew when they were both foreign ministers, and how accountability can happen even at the highest levels of political office — based on her coverage of the war criminal tribunals at The Hague for the former Yugoslavia.
Not only did she share how she went from becoming a sociologist to a politician who helped bring Croatia into the EU, but she is also working with politicians globally to potentially reinvent international law.
Truly, an inspiring series.
She told the Bette audience that “the only ally of small countries is international law.”
She also said “when people stop accepting the tyranny it takes the wind out of the sails of the tyrants.”
All this was fresh on my mind when RadPod interviewed Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak this week for the 4th anniversary of Russia’s large-scale invasion of her country. Now living as a refugee in Lithuania, Boriak shared her thoughts and experience in a 40-minute uninterrupted monologue of pain and historic knowledge. “International law is dead,” she said matter of factly.
So it’ll be up to people in small and “middle countries” to demand its return to life.
All things are possible if you simply push on, as we learned from our chat with Slavenka Drakulić, a Croatian journalist who also documented the war crime trials of the former Yugoslavia.
Let’s visual The Hague and accountability for the current pack of war criminals and maybe it won't be The Hague, as Pusić suggested, but another international consortium of democratic nations and peoples who step into the breach.
Invite: Founder’s AI Series
Bette’s Tuesday AI Series with Jim Stewartson, Part 1 & 2 — March 3 & March 10, 11 am Pacific; 2 pm Eastern
We kicked off our AI series last week with geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra on how Russia is manipulating LLMs by producing a tsunami of fakes, and this coming Tuesday, we launch our Founder’s AI Series with Emmy-award winning game developer Jim Stewartson, my RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast co-host.
Stewartson will be offering Bette members who support me at the Founding level a multi-part series on all things AI, what’s real, what’s hype, and what you need to know. This series begins on Tuesday, March 3 and continues on March 10. To upgrade your membership to Founding Level, please do so here:
Here are some useful links for those who plan to attend to read in advance from Jim’s “mind-war” substack on subjects he’ll be discussing — AI Psychosis, Chatbot Doomerism, the Big Con, and the AI Bubble Driving Trump’s Kleptocracy.
More on Jim:
In 2020, Jim Stewartson, an Emmy award-winning game developer and pioneer of alternate reality gaming, saw that technology he’d helped build for video gaming communities was being misused to attack Americans. From the perspective of Jim’s unique experience, the QAnon movement was leading millions of Americans into a labyrinth of lies in order to unduly influence them in ways that fractured families and threatened the very foundations of our democracy. Now in his sixth year, Jim continues to report his findings at his “mind-war” substack, while enduring lawfare by retired lt. gen. Mike Flynn and current director of the FBI Kash Patel, both of whom Jim identified as being involved in ongoing disinformation efforts against our country. To support his efforts defending media freedom, go here.
Jim began web programming in 1994 and was the first person to make a 3D game on the web in 1996. He won a Primetime Emmy for Original Interactive Content in 2012 and earned two Grand Prix CyberLions from Cannes. He has 8 patents, and worked at Google/Niantic while Pokémon Go was being made. He made pioneering VR, AR and AI technology and helped invent alternate reality games (ARGs) for entertainment, which he saw perverted into industrial brainwashing machines like QAnon. He also co-hosts the RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast and has worked in the field of AI.
One thing not in Jim’s bio is the fact he was a bass player in a DC punk band that moved to San Francisco. Since pretty much all my best friends are bass players, I wasn’t surprised to learn this about him when we first became friends in 2021. Photo below is from our first meeting in the South Bay beach community of Los Angeles, July 2021.
That meeting led to this iconic report in Byline Times from five years ago:
A Brainwashed Death Cult: The Gamification of Conspiracy
And just a few weeks later, we launched RadPod.
Looking forward to seeing our Founder’s on Tuesday. Just fyi, we have no event this Sunday.
If you would like to upgrade your membership, please note that to become a Founding Member, you can donate any amount above the full annual membership fee.
As a reminder, those who support me at the highest level help keep this project afloat, and allow me to offer discounts for those who would not otherwise be able to attend our community events. Thanks as always for everyone’s support.
Keep scrolling for registration details.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Her Hot Type column appears in Byline Supplement. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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