post pub. Jul 20, 2026
Recap of a Linear Digressions conversation with Stanford linguist Chris Potts on "invisible failure modes" — quiet moments in human-AI conversations where something goes wrong (self-contradiction, answering the wrong question, silent give-up loops) and the user never notices. Covers his research finding these in a majority of studied conversations, the novice/delegative vs. expert/augmentative user stance divide, evidence that confident-sounding model language anti-correlates with correctness yet correlates with trust, and the "seven levels of enlightenment" the researchers went through when they found the labeling task itself too hard without help from frontier models.