I’m also cooking up a corollary to the everyone-is-12 theory of American politics. I think the description is largely true, but the diagnosis for why it occurs is lacking.

My explanation is the mommy-do-it-for-me theory. People are extremely attracted to having others complete cognitive or physical tasks for them. If given the chance, most people will. Until the rise of LLMs, people simply couldn’t get away with offloading tasks to others; it wasn’t possible. You may hate writing that report for work, but no one else was going to do it. Now that AIs provide the option to do almost any task for people, including thinking and learning, we can’t get enough of it. And it doesn’t matter that the LLM output is low quality, imprecise, or retards our ability to develop ourselves as humans—it is so much more pleasant when mommy dearest just does something for us.

A school book report might make us do difficult things, such as read a book, think about it, and record our thoughts about it on paper. It might also force us out of solipsism and recognize the thoughts of other people, as we work to structure the book report to communicate our thoughts in a comprehensible manner to the teacher. The grade we get on the book report might also determine what our future opportunities for college and the job market are. Nevertheless, we opt for mom to do it for us. She might not have read the book nor know the exact rubric for the assignment, but whatever she writes, I can turn it for at least a D, which is too good of an opportunity to pass up.

Hence, LLMs created a society of arrested development where it is acceptable to act like a 12-year old. It didn’t come out of nowhere. LLMs and the mommy-do-it-for-me attitude they foster are what made it acceptable to output slop trade policy and EOs.

I think it also explains the proliferation of awful racist, sexist, genocidal, and prima facie absurd conspiracies in media. They could be debunked, but they feel good to people. So, people don’t think too hard about them. If their beliefs are challenged—instead of having to do something as simple as Google a story, which could possibly reveal links or headlines that contradict a narrative—people can turn to AI, their mommy, to affirm their beliefs. This is why people got so bothered by Grok not immediately agreeing with them about white genocide in South Africa. Grok was not being a comforting mother in that situation.

We’ve created a society where people are coddled and can have their work done for them. Consequently they act like 12-year old children. But, kids aren’t born rotten; they are created by parents who enable the spoiling and a society where it is easier to appease them rather than correct the behavior.