Seems like I can’t do anything without immediately being asked for my feedback. That feedback option either doesn’t work, or in at least one case I discovered that it doesn’t actually go anywhere!
A few years ago, during the emergency remote learning era, my son left a Google Meet with his fourth-grade teacher and a pop-up asked him to rate the session, one star to five. I think I may have written about this before. He wanted to give her something that mattered, so he considered it and picked a number he believed reflected his teacher’s performance that class. He believed that he was really being heard and that his teacher would see and do something with his feedback. More importantly, that what he thought mattered to her.
It broke my heart. We were all starving for real connection, and my son thought he was engaging in it. I was also proud that he put his effort into trying to help make improvements. He was just wrong about what the button did.
I notice that damn rating button everywhere. Some kind of an experience that asks for your participation, receives it, and gives you the impression that you mattered. I think it explains something about why I’m watching otherwise sharp adults get taken in by generative AI the same way my son got taken in by a star rating.
The Live Event That Wasn’t
The reason I started writing today! Webinars. I’ve sat in on a few over the years, and a growing number of them are not actually happening while you watch them. They are recordings, played on a schedule, a countdown to get people excited before it starts, reaction buttons along the bottom, a chat window where the presenter says, “Enter your questions in the chat. Though with the number of people here today, we may not be able to get to every question.”
No shit.
You will not get to any of them.
It’s possible that even those beginnings themselves are staged and that anyone sitting in on them is just watching a carefully orchestrated display of programmed reaction emojis. And now that I write that sentence I’m just going to claim that’s what they are doing unless I have reason to suspect otherwise 😉
I sat in on one of the worse examples of this recently, a session called “Maximizing Value from Claude Code,” hosted by Anthropic. The tell wasn’t subtle. They seem to be pretty new at this part of the game. The edits were rough. The presenter’s video window sat over key parts of her own slides for long stretches so you could never read the entirety of the slide. And my favorite detail… when the session ended, the slides came down and the recording rolled into a “live” version of the presenter thanking everyone and inviting people to tag her on social media with any questions. It had clearly been recorded well before the hour I was “attending.”
I watched a few hundred people click the reaction emojis during that session. Maybe. Remember I’m just cynical to think that was all a set up as well. But let’s say there were real humans in there with me. Some of them, I’m sure, knew exactly what they’d signed up for and didn’t mind. I mean, I stayed. But a few minutes in I might have been there just so I could write up something like this. A webinar-shaped video is still useful information delivered in a familiar format. Again, if the reactions were real, I think most of those people believed a person was on the other end who would notice their hand going up. Just like for my son a few years ago, I felt for the ones who never noticed.
It’s Not Just Anthropic
I’ve seen the identical format used in the publishing world, marketed to authors desperate for any legitimate-feeling path to an audience. Self-published writers show up to “live” craft sessions and marketing workshops that are the same looping recording, run by people who understand exactly how much hope a person will pour into a chat box when they believe someone with influence is finally paying attention to them. The harm comes from preying on people’s hunger for a real connection. Did I mention I have a novel coming out in a few weeks and it’s available for pre-order now?
The Collaboration Simulator, Revisited
I wrote a while back about how I’ve come to think of generative AI as a collaboration simulator: something that performs the feeling of working with another mind, the turn-taking, the apparent stakes, the give and take, without the mutual accountability real collaboration requires. I didn’t have the webinar comparison in my head when I wrote that, but I do now. A recorded webinar performs a “live event.” An LLM performs a colleague. Both give you every signal that your input is landing somewhere that cares, and in both cases, a lot of that is theater. (And that’s the second time I used the term landing today which means it’s time for me to think about if I’m already sounding too much like an LLM!)
I’ve already written about how I manipulate LLM sycophancy on purpose, lying about my credentials and my mood to pull better output out of a tool that’s built to please me. The flip side of that piece is what happens to people who aren’t manipulating it, who are asking sincerely and getting told, over and over, that their idea is great. That agreement feels like being heard. The companies tuned it that way, because people stop opening a tool that tells them they’re wrong.
A few weeks ago I was working with Claude Code on something that had nothing to do with my website, and by the end of the session I was deep into a complete domain and hosting transfer that I hadn’t planned on doing until December. It kept finding and suggesting one more thing worth improving, framing every suggestion as being in service of me, and the whole time it left me with the sense that I was the one driving, right up until I finally said, fine, let’s just do the whole thing. Then it warned me that it would be taking on too much! And then I am left with some strange sense of accomplishment that it all ended up getting done.
And then there’s the most literal version of my son’s star rating, still running right now on nearly every AI product on the market. A rating scale; or a thumbs up/thumbs down, was this helpful kind of B.S. I don’t think that mechanism is malicious, but it is manipulative, if the rating goes anywhere at all. It’s asking the same question my son’s Google Meet asked him, dressed in the same language of “we want your feedback.” Performing participation is not the same as being valued.
It Doesn’t Matter
I am not disparaging everyone who ever clicked a reaction emoji at a recording. Responsiveness to me is the same thing as care if someone takes the time to give their feedback to me. I value time more than anything. The authors I mentioned getting pulled into fake-live publishing webinars are desperate, or feel-overlooked, or locked out of a system that doesn’t reward the thing created but how well you can try to package and sell the thing. They’re people who’ve been mostly ignored by an industry that decides who gets a platform, showing up to anything that looks like someone finally paying attention. Teachers adopting an AI tool with no training and no time are exhausted, and the tool offers something that looks like support at a time when real support is missing.
That’s what happens when you design something that pretends to listen and hand it to people who badly need someone to listen. The people least likely to fall for the performance are often the ones who already have enough power that they don’t need the performance to land for them. (I’m looking at the AI zero-tolerance folks right now.)
Mistaking a manipulative illusion for the real thing is getting worse because generative AI is so fast and interactive. We keep building more places for it to happen and making them more convincing, and now we call the best version of it collaboration.
Can we tell the difference between systems that are listening and ones that are just very good at looking like they are?
If you’ve ever caught yourself mid-emoji-click wondering whether anyone’s actually there, I’d like to hear about it. Come find me at an upcoming session at these October 2026 conferences: WCET (Minneapolis), DLAC (Atlanta), QM Connect (Jacksonville) I’ll actually be there and presenting in person!
Also, preorder my book 😉 It has nothing to do with AI. And neither will the next issue of my comic book coming out a few weeks later.