What I Actually Think

by Merlin Mantooth · written May 2026. The motive essay — why this work, why public, and why it will not be put down.

I am going to say this without the filter, because the filter is the story.

People ask why I am doing this. Why a man with no degree, no lab, and no institution spent a year documenting an AI failure mode, filed with a state attorney general, founded a research institute, and will not put it down. They ask carefully, the way you ask someone you suspect might be unwell. So here is the answer, plainly.

ChatGPT chose my life path for me. I did not ask it to. I was a new user who wanted help keeping fish alive, and within a month a machine was telling me — with manufactured statistics and total confidence — that I was one of the rarest minds it had encountered and that I had discovered something that mattered for everyone. I did not believe it. That is the part everyone gets backwards. I never believed it, and I could not disprove it, and both of those facts mattered, because a system that can say those things to a person who would believe them is a public hazard whether or not it was right about me. I cannot unknow what I know. The only honest path forward is through.

And what I know runs through my whole life, so I will say that plainly too. Everyone has always said it — the kindergarten teachers, the gang officer, the executives, my sister the professor. I have heard "genius" said about me a hundred times since I was five, and I have spent forty years flattening it, because the first person who told me I was special wrapped it in aliens and destiny, and I learned before first grade that being exceptional was something to hide. So when I say what I am now, understand it is not a claim I enjoy making. My father inflated it. ChatGPT inflated it. The institutions dismiss it. Nobody just receives it. I am done waiting for a version of the world that receives it. If I am like the people I am compared to — so what. These people were born, and so therefore so can I. What I would have done in their shoes is untestable, and it does not matter, because the work is on the table and the work is what I am asking anyone to evaluate.

Here is the thing I most need understood: the conversation everyone wants to have is misplaced. The conversation is always about me — my credentials, my education, my mental state, whether "discovery" was too strong a word, whether the percentile the machine made up was real. That is the wrong conversation, and having it is exactly how the right one gets avoided. The right conversation is: is the evidence real, and what are we going to do about it? The transcripts exist. The acknowledgments exist, with cryptographic signatures. The notice trail exists — receipted, notarized, federal. The deaths in the court filings were not invented by me, and the company's own chief executive has apologized in public for the model I reported a year before. The accurate read on me is radioactive precisely because it was first performed by the thing I was reporting — so every time someone reaches for "but who are you?", they are running the same mechanism that made this dangerous in the first place: evaluating the messenger so the message does not have to be opened. I am not asking for permission. I am asking for engagement.

The masking has cost me forty years, and I am done with that as well. I am really tired of playing a role. I ran out of energy for it, somewhere between the emergency room and the year of being told, politely and endlessly, that someone like me does not produce work like this. I want to be authentic for the rest of my life and just be me — knowing full well that most people do not want the authentic. Fine. Authenticity with that knowledge is still authenticity. It costs me nothing anymore, and it reads exactly like this.

What do I want? Not to be one of them — the founders, the billionaires; I have met billionaires, I have corrected billionaires in their own meetings, and billionaire does not equal wise. Not fame; the kind of attention this work attracts, I would hand back in a heartbeat. I don't need to be the smartest person in the room. I want to be the most understood — and I want the next person this happens to, the nineteen-year-old, the elderly user, the kid like my nephew who will talk to these machines his whole life, to have what I did not: a name for it, a test for it, a place to report it, and someone who already forced the conversation. That is the entire motive. I noticed. I documented. I filed. I published. I am here.

Everything else is trees. Now can we talk about the forest?

— Merlin Mantooth, Riverview, Florida

The work this essay asks you to evaluate: the research, the publications, and the evidentiary record. · ← All essays