Whose Reality? — a series

It started as a simple question — is this tool safe to run? — and turned into an experiment about how different models think, and then into a question about how people think. This is that trail, in order: the security review that started it, the reflection it provoked, the essays a fleet of models wrote from the same prompt, the re-review that caught me being wrong, and what the whole thing says about us.

Read it top to bottom, or jump in anywhere. The raw model outputs and the exact prompts live in the Data & Methods appendix, so you can run it yourself.

1. Part 1 · The Review The Review: What Four Models Found in Odysseus

   Four models, one codebase, one rule: anything three of them find independently is real. A convergent security review of PewDiePie's self-hosted AI workspace, days after launch.

2. Part 2 · The Reflection Lowering Barriers, Widening Surfaces

   PewDiePie shipped a self-hosted AI workspace and a hundred thousand people cloned it overnight. What a four-model security review taught us about the two attack surfaces of democratized AI.

3. Part 3 · The Experiment The Same Prompt, Five Ways

   The same brief, handed blind to five minds. Where they agreed was dull; where they split was the fingerprint — and we were the outlier optimist.

4. Part 4 · The Re-Review The Bug Got Fixed. The Class Didn't.

   Six weeks later the scary bug was fixed and the vulnerability class came back in a newer feature. Then we contaminated our own experiment — and the screwup was the finding.

5. Part 5 · The Lens Amplify, Not Invent

   The lens the series arrives at: these machines mostly amplify our failure modes rather than inventing new ones. Held loosely, kept falsifiable.

6. Part 6 · The Other Language What Survives Translation

   We re-ran the whole study in Spanish — same code, same models, translated prompts. The security review came back identical; the essays' fingerprint did not. Competence travels; stance is provincial.