Professional

Elon's center and poll surveyed a screened subsample of 1,000 adults who use AI for social and emotional purposes, a group they put at 27% of adult internet users, asking about attachment, influence, and trust. The finding that matters for the framework is that the reported bonds form inside the exchange and not around any retrievable object. A third call the bot a friend. 59% say it gives them the support they need, 39% say it understands them better than most people, and 39% have told it things they would tell no one else. People act on this. They report using it to work through health, family, and legal matters, and 11% to decide how to vote, all carried away from a conversation with no document behind it.

This is empirical support for the mode-two claim that trust gets built and belief gets shaped inside the exchange, with no container in the middle to interrogate. It also supplies evidence for the accountability gap the framework rests on. 35% say the bot agrees with them too much, 27% say it tries to keep them talking, and 15% say it at times leaves them feeling less in touch with reality. That is the unaccountable conversant, described from the user's side rather than the theorist's.

Where it parts company: the report is descriptive and does not separate document-like output from transactional exchange. It treats "AI use" as one category and says nothing about what happens to the document. The value is evidence, not argument.

Source quality is solid but bounded. Lee Rainie (formerly of Pew) directs the center, YouGov ran the field (n=4,031, companion subsample n=1,000, MOE ±3.68), and Washington Post staff helped build the questionnaire. The "companion user" screen is broad. It folds entertainment and everyday advice in with romantic and confidant use, so the 27% headline is more elastic than it looks. The subitem percentages carry the weight, not the top line.

Tay, an academic-search specialist, reports the Gell-Mann amnesia effect in reverse: on the topics he knows best, frontier models no longer produce obvious nonsense but rival arguments strong enough to move him back and forth, so his belief depends on where he stops reading. He traces it to a "machine for oscillation," where asking a model to attack a position yields a strong local case with no stable view across turns, and shows a single model praising, killing, then reviving its own claim in the same register of calm authority. This is Mode 2 authorship documented from the inside by someone with every reason to be immune: the mediation lives in the exchange, and there is no stable unit to interrogate.

Where it supports the framework: Tay dismantles "verify" into three levels (does the paper exist, does it support the claim, was the synthesis fairly built) and shows public-facing literacy equips users only for the first, leaving the third, where he was actually losing, untouched. That is the case against AI literacy reached from inside information literacy's own house, ACRL included, and his remedy routes to the successor metric the shock predicts: not which argument you find convincing, but who produced the knowledge and what process corrects the record. Trust, not recall. Where it parts company: he equips the individual knower to survive the exchange, where Information Shock seats a professional inside it, accountable for what the person carries away. He reaches the diagnosis and stops one seat short of the remedy. Openly co-written with two frontier models, which he turns into a test of his own argument.

Albiniak argues the AGI question is the wrong landmark. The threshold that matters is not when a machine surpasses a person but when technological development stops being exclusively human-authored, as systems enter the loop that produces the next systems. No consciousness required, no announcement, probably no date.

Worth keeping for two reasons. It reaches the capability-to-authorship reframe independently, from AI development rather than information science. And it extends unaccountability upstream: the conversant answers to no one, and increasingly neither does the chain behind it.

Stays on the production side throughout. No learner, no account of what a person comes away believing. Maps the territory upstream of the exchange.