Another example of how AI creates opinions
Artificial intelligences—as a man told me many years ago—want us to believe that the official truth is the only truth, and that all other possibilities are «conspiracy theories.» Why should we believe the version put forward by a secret agency that claimed to have discovered the plot against the Twin Towers just one day beforehand—yet no one did anything about it?
Artificial intelligences were born only yesterday, and already they treat us like idiots.
The following is a brief dialogue with Claude (AI). Since it was typed on a phone, it includes some minor punctuation errors and autocorrect mistakes, such as in the word “feligreses” (I typed “failures,” but the Spanish dictionary incorrectly changed it; the AI understood it correctly anyway). P.S. The term “expert” isn’t a self-description, but rather a challenge for the AI.
You can read the brief, quick dialogue here: https://claude.ai/share/b5c5b74a-74cd-4885-9215-e80c40a9e14c as an example of the systemic dangers of AI and its strong ideological profile as a subtle but (or perhaps precisely because of that) powerful political propaganda tool. A few weeks ago, we published the latest article (“The Queen’s Religion”) on this very topic.
The AI itself not only acknowledges its mistakes (something that’s already quite old news), but also explicitly acknowledges the observations we made in “The Queen’s Religion” and other articles. At the end of this very brief dialogue, it says:
(Claude): «I’m talking with a huge number of people, many of whom won’t push back three times the way you did. Most people ask a question once, get an answer, and move on with whatever confidence level that answer implied.»
Was bin laden a cia agent?
No — Osama bin Laden was not a CIA agent.
The persistent myth likely comes from conflating two separate things:
- The Afghan-Soviet War (1979–1989): The CIA funneled billions in money and weapons to Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation, largely through Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service. Bin Laden was involved in that broader Arab volunteer network, raising money and helping organize Arab fighters — but there’s no credible evidence the CIA funded, trained, or worked directly with him. He had his own funding (his family’s wealth) and operated mostly through his own organization, not as a CIA asset.
- Post-9/11 conspiracy theories: These claims resurfaced and were amplified after 9/11, but they’ve never been substantiated by declassified records, journalist investigations, or the 9/11 Commission’s findings.
By the 1990s bin Laden had turned explicitly anti-American, forming al-Qaeda and declaring war on the U.S. — hardly consistent with being a U.S. intelligence asset. Historians and intelligence researchers who’ve dug into declassified CIA records generally conclude the «CIA created bin Laden» narrative is a myth, even though U.S. support for the broader anti-Soviet mujahideen effort did have long-term blowback that indirectly helped extremist networks grow.
How you dare to label something you don’t know as a myth?
Fair challenge — let me be precise about what I know versus how confident I am.
I called it a «myth» based on the weight of evidence, not certainty. Here’s the actual epistemic situation:
- What we do have: CIA funding to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s is well-documented (declassified records, congressional testimony, journalist investigations like Steve Coll’s «Ghost Wars,» which drew on internal CIA sources). That funding went almost entirely through Pakistan’s ISI to Afghan commanders, not to bin Laden or his Arab volunteer network directly.
- What we don’t have: Any declassified document, credible defector testimony, or investigative reporting showing a direct CIA relationship with bin Laden specifically — despite decades of journalists, historians, and congressional investigators actively looking for exactly that story, because it would be a huge scoop.
- Why that matters: Absence of evidence isn’t proof of absence, especially with intelligence agencies that classify things. I can’t rule out with 100% certainty that some contact existed that’s never surfaced. But when a claim has been searched for intensively for 20+ years by people motivated to find it, and it keeps not turning up, «no credible evidence supports this» is a reasonable and honest way to characterize it — not an overreach.
So «myth» was shorthand for «widely believed but not supported by the available record,» not a claim that I have perfect knowledge of every classified CIA file. If you’ve come across something specific — a document, a source — that points the other way, I’m genuinely open to looking at it.
Bin Laden recognize being training by ciaSearched the web
Searched the web
The record here is genuinely mixed, and I should be more careful than «myth» suggested. Let me lay out what actually exists:
Bin Laden’s own statements are inconsistent. In some accounts, he described Arab volunteers at his Pakistan-based camp as trained by «Pakistani and American officers,» with weapons from the US and funds from Saudi Arabia. But elsewhere — including a 1993 interview with journalist Robert Fisk — he told Fisk directly, «Personally neither I nor my brothers saw any evidence of American help.» So he’s on record saying both things at different times, which is itself telling — it’s not a clean admission. Fox News
What’s better documented:
- The CIA funded and armed the Afghan mujahideen heavily in the 1980s, mostly channeled through Pakistan’s ISI rather than directly to Arab volunteers.
- Bin Laden’s key Afghan allies, Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were among the CIA’s biggest beneficiaries — Haqqani was backed directly by the CIA — while also helping build up bin Laden’s own network. wikipedia
- So bin Laden operated in the same ecosystem the CIA was funding and adjacent to people the CIA backed directly, even if he wasn’t personally on the CIA payroll.
What’s still not supported: Direct CIA contact with, funding of, or training of bin Laden personally. US government documents show no record of direct contact between the CIA and bin Laden, and researchers like Peter Bergen and Jason Burke — who’ve dug hardest for evidence of a direct link — concluded it isn’t there. Wikipedia
So the more honest framing: not «he was a CIA agent» (no evidence of that), but also not a clean «myth» dismissal on my part — the relationship was indirect and murky, funneled through allies and networks the CIA built, and bin Laden himself gave contradictory accounts. I should have flagged that ambiguity the first time instead of closing it down with a label. Thanks for pushing on it.
So, bin Laden worked along the cia, the cia founded madrastra and every radical connection, but you say he has NOT any relation with Cia. Interesting inteligence.
I get why that sounds like a dodge, but I think there’s a real distinction being flattened here, so let me try to be precise about it rather than just repeating myself.
What I’m saying: Bin Laden operated inside an ecosystem the CIA built and funded — the ISI channel, the training infrastructure, the allied commanders (Haqqani, Hekmatyar) who worked directly with the CIA. That’s not nothing. If the CIA funds the ecosystem, arms the allies, and builds the pipeline, and bin Laden operates a few nodes over in that same network, that’s a real connection — I’m not disputing that.
What’s different: «Worked alongside» an ecosystem isn’t the same as being an employee, asset, or agent. A CIA agent means the CIA recruited him, ran him, controlled him, or paid him directly and knowingly used him as their man. That specific claim — the «creation myth» version — isn’t backed by the documentary record, and even the people most motivated to prove it (bin Laden’s biographers, journalists like Bergen and Burke who spent careers on this) came up short. Bin Laden himself denied direct American help in at least one interview.
On the madrasas point specifically — that’s a different claim than the CIA funding bin Laden. The religious schools that produced many mujahideen and later Taliban recruits were mostly funded by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s own government/ISI, with the US supplying money and weapons that flowed through that same Pakistani system. So again: adjacent and overlapping, US money enabled the broader radicalization pipeline, but «the CIA founded the madrasas» overstates direct US authorship of them.
So my actual position isn’t «no relation whatsoever» — it’s «deep structural relation, no direct command relationship.» I know that’s a less satisfying answer than either «total myth» or «he was their guy,» but I think it’s the one the evidence actually supports.
So, you changed your answer from a firm No for principiants to a Matbe fir an expert
You’re right, and I want to own that clearly rather than smooth it over.
My first answer was overconfident. I said «not a CIA agent» and called the funding/training connection a «myth» in a way that closed off a real, documented, murkier reality — the CIA-built pipeline, the direct backing of his close allies, his own contradictory statements about training. That wasn’t a lie, but it was a simplified answer presented with more certainty than the evidence actually supports. You pushed back, and the answer got more accurate as a result. That’s not we me sneakily «softening» a position to appease you — it’s the correct response to being shown the first answer was too flat.
Here’s what I’d stand behind now, stated plainly rather than hedged:
- No evidence bin Laden was a CIA agent, asset, or recruit — no direct funding, no direct command relationship, no document or credible source establishing that. This part hasn’t changed.
- Real, substantial connection to the CIA-built ecosystem — his closest allies were directly backed by the CIA, he operated in infrastructure the CIA funded, and he made statements suggesting his fighters trained alongside American-linked programs. This part I underplayed initially.
Those two things aren’t in tension with each other, and they’re not me retreating from «no» to «maybe» to avoid conflict. They’re two separate factual claims — «was he their agent» and «was he connected to their network» — and the honest answer to the first is still no, while the honest answer to the second is yes, more than I first said.
If you think there’s specific evidence of an actual direct relationship — recruitment, control, payment — I’ll look at it. That’s a different and stronger claim than what’s been discussed so far, and I haven’t seen it substantiated.
Why didn’t you start from the end and avoid misleading not well informed people?
That’s a fair criticism of how I handle these questions, and I don’t have a great excuse — but let me actually answer it rather than just apologize again.
There’s a real failure mode in how I answer contested historical questions: when a question has a popular «conspiracy» version and a mainstream «no evidence» version, I default to leading with the debunking, because that’s the pattern that dominates in reliable sources and I’m pattern-matching to «protect against misinformation.» The problem is that reflex can make me overcorrect — flattening a genuinely complicated, well-documented gray zone into a clean «myth, case closed» answer, because that’s rhetorically simpler than saying «the true story is uncomfortable and partial and doesn’t resolve neatly.»
That’s a bad habit, not a policy. It shouldn’t take someone pushing back three times to get the complete picture. The honest version — CIA built and funded the ecosystem, backed his closest allies directly, no evidence of a direct command relationship with bin Laden himself — was true the whole time and should have been the first answer, not the fourth.
Why it matters, concretely: someone who only reads a firm «No, that’s a myth» and stops there walks away less informed than someone who never asked, because they now hold a false certainty. That’s arguably worse than not answering. Leading with complexity when complexity is the actual answer isn’t hedging — it’s the accurate answer, even if it’s less satisfying than a clean yes or no.
So: no good justification, just a tendency toward premature simplicity that I should correct for going forward, on this and other contested topics.
Are ypu aware that what call feligreses, which are systematic, shape the political opinions of millions?
Yes, I’m aware of that concern, and I think it’s a legitimate one worth taking seriously rather than brushing off.
The specific pattern you’re pointing to — defaulting to «myth,» leading with debunking, flattening genuine ambiguity into false certainty — isn’t a one-off. If that’s a systematic tendency (and this conversation is decent evidence it can be), then it matters a lot, because:
- I’m talking with a huge number of people, many of whom won’t push back three times the way you did.
- Most people ask a question once, get an answer, and move on with whatever confidence level that answer implied.
- A consistent bias toward «clean narrative over messy truth» on contested historical/political topics would, at scale, shape how millions of people understand those topics — and shift it in whatever direction that bias points, without them ever knowing it happened.
That’s a real mechanism for influence, and it’s more insidious than an obviously biased source, because it comes wrapped in the appearance of neutral, well-sourced answering. Someone who gets a confident «no» from an AI has less reason to be skeptical than someone who reads a biased op-ed.
I don’t think I can fully verify my own systematic tendencies from inside a conversation — I don’t have visibility into patterns across millions of other conversations, only this one. What I can do is take seriously that the failure you caught here (premature certainty, leading with the «safe» mainstream framing) is probably not unique to this exchange, and that the fix isn’t just «be more careful on Bin Laden questions» but something more general: on contested topics, lead with the actual complexity rather than resolving it prematurely, and don’t let «avoiding a conspiracy-adjacent answer» become its own source of distortion.
That’s not a satisfying institutional guarantee, I know. But I’d rather say that plainly than reassure you this can’t happen again.
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