

Honestly it sounds like, which I think might be worse, that he’s been using it so much that he’s picked up its mannerisms of speech. From his own description of the confrontations his wife and family had with him, it sounds like he’s been talking to it a lot on his own time.
Gotta agree, it’s a testament to how addicting that type of validation is that he’s finding it addictive as “a source of dopamine”. He’s always struck me as pretty level headed in my (admittedly limited) watching of him, and he’s clearly a smart guy. Reminds me of how nobody is totally immune to forces like advertising and predatory stuff like gambling.

I appreciate that pushback (/s), although honestly if you (like myself) find AI-tells like that cringe, you’re almost certainly not the type of person using it addictively.
There’s a pretty strong body of research that lots of people are subconsciously picking up language patterns from AI, such as the increased prevalence of words like “delve”. It’s the basic social mirroring we do to pick up language from anyone we talk to, only weirdly twisted because the thing so many people are talking to isn’t human.
“I appreciate that pushback” isn’t a commonly complained enough tell that people would be intentionally avoiding it, I find it pretty believable that a heavy AI user would unironically use it in a Q&A.