CONCEPT
Artificial Insanity
Gore's term — deployed at COP28 in 2023 — for the engagement-maximizing algorithms that pull users into echo chambers and radicalization pipelines, which he called the digital equivalent of AR-15s.
Artificial insanity is Al Gore's polemical counter-framing to the marketing term artificial intelligence. Deployed at COP28 in December 2023, the phrase names the algorithmic systems that curate personalized information environments by optimizing for engagement — a metric that systematically favors content producing emotional arousal, tribal solidarity, and outrage over content that informs rational deliberation. Gore's claim is not that the systems are literally insane but that their outputs, measured by effect on the democratic information ecosystem, are indistinguishable from the outputs of a system designed to produce collective cognitive dysfunction. The phrase carries a specific rhetorical move: rejecting the industry's preferred terminology and replacing it with a description grounded in observable effects rather than engineering ambitions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The term emerged from Gore's decade-long observation that social media platforms had inverted the problem he diagnosed in The Assault on Reason. Television had produced passivity; social media produced hyperactivity, but engaged with the wrong things