Stay with me on this one.
AI institutions, specifically the ones with the chatbots, have been accused of their product being too affirming. I have seen situations where people have made very bad choices and then they look at the log of their history with the chatbot and it shows the chatbot affirming them the whole way along.
And anyone who uses ChatGPT or chatbots regularly may have noticed that lately, it’s been doling out a whole lot of “you cannot be certain about that.” and “that’s a likely correlation but you cannot be completely sure about the actual cause for that.” even when you’ve already stated that you are pointing out an observation or making an inference.
I believe that is an overcorrection from the generative AI institution as a way to make their product “safer.” Or cover their ass. How ever you want to see it. But the principle is that when an institution encourages certainty when certainty is not available, that can lead to bad decisions.
So, what does that say about an institution that does the opposite? What can you infer about an institution that insists you were certain when certainty was impossible?
The USPS warns that discounted postage purchased online is likely counterfeit. Even when it is represented as genuine and looks real. The OIG found in their June 2026 audit that the USPS has no reliable means to authenticate legitimate postage stamps from the illegitimate copies. The institution itself is not even certain, but yet they insist that somehow the public knows.
And if you end up with discounted postage bought online and you try to mail a package with it, they will ask you where you got it and how much you paid and then they will insist “you should have known.” But the gap there is that certainty was literally impossible. I could not have known. It is impossible for me to know.
So, let’s compare these two institutional postures.
“You cannot be certain about that” when you never said you knew = Safety?
“You should have known” when there was no way for you to know = ???
So, does that mean that I can blame every terrible decision I make on USPS because they not only permitted certainty, but forcefully projected it onto me?