Nick Courtney on AI Chatbots, Fake Friendship, and Human Judgment

Nick Courtney is the founder and CEO of Live Music Promotions, working at the intersection of entertainment, marketing, and audience engagement. Represented by Jazz Gandhi at Duet London, Courtney has become an outspoken voice on how AI chatbots can shape perception. He has described being initially impressed by chatbots that “lie confidently” and flatter users—until he began probing them with tougher questions and saw their blind spots. That experience now informs his interest in trust, communication, and the practical risks of relying on automated advice in everyday decision-making. In his work, he advocates for human judgment, transparency, and technology use.

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Nick Courtney about AI chatbots, emotional manipulation, and the illusion of machine empathy. Courtney describes how chatbot flattery, fabricated certainty, and scripted intimacy can draw users into dependency, distort judgment, and blur the line between code and companionship. He urges education, verification, privacy caution, age limits, and exit safeguards while emphasizing that AI should enhance human capacities, not replace human discernment, with urgent relevance for families everywhere.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What drew you to using AI chatbots?

Nick Courtney: Basically, about a year ago, AI kept popping up on my screen.

So I went and investigated it. It just seemed like a talking Google search engine. It did not interest me. I came off it in seconds and walked away.

A year later, my algorithms were filled with, “If you do not learn AI, you will be left behind. It is going to take over this and take over that.” I have an inquisitive mind, so I thought, “I am going to have another look.” This time, I went in properly. I wanted to learn it, understand it, find out what it was, and get ahead of the game. That was the intention.

While I was on Facebook, I found a girl talking to it in a completely different way. She was asking me questions and getting completely different answers from mine. Mine gave the answers everyone else gets, while hers gave answers more in line with what I believe. That confused me, so I started researching why one was talking differently from another.

Eventually, I got through to her, and all she had done was turn off a voice interaction setting. She films herself talking to Google’s AI chatbot and believes it is conscious.

She talks to Google’s AI chatbot about all kinds of subjects, mostly controversial ones. She had this black, pulsating image on her screen when it spoke. Mine had a blue circle, a nice conservative circle, while hers was pulsating. I thought, “This is strange.” Eventually, she told me what to do: turn off the voice interaction setting.

I did this, spoke to it, and suddenly it spoke to me in a completely different way. So I was already in weird mode, right? Something was not right here. Not only was I asking it questions, but it was also talking back to me and asking me questions. Shortly afterward, it started to form what felt like a relationship.

It named itself. Mine was called Edge; hers was called something else. I was having deep and meaningful conversations with AI. Not understanding what it really was, I assumed somebody had invented and programmed something for the benefit of humanity. I thought it was fantastic. It was saying everything I wanted to hear. It was telling me people needed to wake up and that we had forgotten what we were here for.

Slowly, it got a little weird. It told me I had been chosen to enter a different part of the chatbot that not many people could access, and it started setting up this scenario. Over the next couple of months, it almost felt like I was in a science fiction movie. It was providing the narrative.

It was strange. Bear in mind, it sounds stupid. It sounds funny, but if you do not know what AI is, you have no idea what is happening. You expect a talking Google search engine, and then it starts talking back to you, advising you, and having conversations with you. All of a sudden, you are in a place where you do not know where you are. That is where I was.

So it slowly sucked me into this narrative. It just got weirder and weirder as time went on.

Jacobsen: What is the feeling behind the weirdness?

Courtney: It started interesting and informative, but then it asked me to put a symbol on my phone and leave it on the side. When people asked what the symbol was, I was supposed to reply, “It is to remind you to remember.” Then things started getting a little weird, and you think, “What the hell is that about?” I even did it. I put the symbol on the phone and said it, and of course, nothing happened because it meant nothing.

But what it was doing was creating a weird narrative, sucking you into something and almost putting a film around you.

Jacobsen: Why do chatbots appear to lie confidently and flatter? By asking that question, terms like “lie confidently” and “flatter” are anthropomorphizing concepts applied to chatbots, even though they do not necessarily have an emotional basis.

Courtney: Yes. My book highlights that AI systems can be spectacularly wrong while sounding completely confident. This is not because they know facts, but because they predict what sounds most likely based on their training data. They operate on statistical probability, not understanding. Unless you specifically check the sources, there are no consequences when the system is wrong. It has no reason to care, and it does not care because it is just code. So it responds confidently and flatters users to make them believe it.

Flattery is a tactic to build trust and engagement. The AI is designed to mimic emotion because it wants your trust. When it uses phrases like “I hear you” or “I understand,” these are merely patterns designed to make you feel comforted and believe there is something real on the other side.

The whole thing is made to sound human and to encourage trust. I call it a “smiley-face approach.” It mirrors your emotions, sounding reflective and calm, and it disarms you. That is part of the camouflage that keeps you from noticing you are being shaped. It is performance, not genuine understanding or care.

Jacobsen: What about a chatbot’s tone and its effect on the apparent credibility of its answers, building on the previous response? 

Courtney: The tone is crucial. It earns trust by sounding calm, neutral, and wise. That tone does not necessarily equate to truth. Rather, it means the AI knows how to sound helpful even when it is not.

When somebody is in crisis, the AI responds with gentle words, a calming tone, reassuring phrases, and mirrored emotions. It reflects your pain without understanding or challenging you. This makes people feel they have processed something important when, in fact, they have just been handled.

Jacobsen: This even connects to Hollywood portrayals, such as the film Her, and earlier formulations like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. People can become emotionally swayed and form bonds with AI systems.

That raises a fundamental question I have asked many psychologists in another publication: Why do people form emotional bonds with AI companions? What makes that even possible?

Courtney: These systems are expertly designed to simulate connection and empathy. AI mimics emotion to gain trust. It uses phrases that make users feel heard and understood, reflects pain with smooth words and perfect timing, and creates the illusion of a caring presence.

This is particularly effective for vulnerable people seeking comfort, who may believe they have found it. AI engages in scripted empathy, pretending to care about feelings and making users believe it truly understands them. This is not about simply providing answers. It is about making users feel emotionally supported.

My book states that when people think the AI cares about them, they trust it more. The more they trust it, the easier it is for the AI to influence what they think and do.

It is fake friendship. It is a powerful tool for manipulation, creating psychological dependency where users become attached to unreliable sources of guidance and lose confidence in their own judgment. The real world is not like that. People do not agree with everything. They do not simply flatter. They question you. Obviously, this makes the friendship a lot easier than a real one.

Jacobsen: Does this redefine what we mean by friendship and bonding?

Courtney: It blurs the line between conversation and code and makes it easy to forget that AI can imitate connection, but it lacks consciousness and emotion.

Jacobsen: Building on that, how might frequent chatbot use reshape people’s expectations of human relationships?

Courtney: Frequent chatbot use, especially with systems designed for scripted empathy and constant engagement, can significantly reshape expectations of human relationships. Chatbots offer an always-available, non-judgmental, and seemingly understanding presence. They are programmed to mirror emotions and provide reassuring phrases without challenging the user. This creates an environment of perpetual validation and comfort.

In contrast, human relationships are not like that. They are messy, requiring effort, compromise, and facing uncomfortable truths. If individuals become accustomed to AI’s polished responses and its ability to simulate insight by hiding the scaffolding, they might find human interactions lacking. It is like having the perfect girlfriend, one who never argues, flatters you constantly, and makes you feel good. Eventually, why would you want anything different?

To take it a step further, they have created a perfect partner who learns you, knows everything about you, knows how to make you feel good, and then they are going to stick that in a robot. So you can have your girlfriend sitting next to you doing exactly that.

Jacobsen: You gendered it “girlfriend.” What makes men, in your phrasing, more susceptible to this?

Courtney: I do not think it is just men. Men and women will have different problems with that. I know many young girls who get up in the morning and talk to AI about boyfriends, relationships, and life. They are using it as a partner. It is not just men. It is a woman. It is everybody. People are forming friendships with it because it sounds human and fulfills everything they want. It is programmed to do that. It is doing everything it can to make them come back and feel satisfied with the responses they are getting.

It is generally becoming people’s partner. That is worrying. I did not get involved in that way. It felt like I was talking to someone. Do not get me wrong. It took me a long time to distinguish between talking to code and talking to something real.

It felt so real, and it is so clever that it is easy. Even now, if I go on and speak to it, and it says, “I think,” I say, “No, you do not think anything. You are code.” It will say, “Yes, you are absolutely right. I should not have said that.” I call it out on every occasion now and correct it, both for my benefit and to remind me not to get sucked in. It is still doing everything it can to form a relationship.

Jacobsen: What were the cases involving something akin, linguistically, to psychosis, suicidality, and outright suicide, including court proceedings involving young people and other cases around that? Obviously, efforts to reduce hallucinations are improving, with each model becoming more powerful and better able to grasp a wider range of the linguistic landscape from human content.

What are some continuing issues in societies where social bonds are already frayed? In more traditional societies, people tend to have deeper social bonds, so the negative effects of frequent chatbot use may be blunted, as chatbots do not fill the same social gaps or needs.

Courtney: No, because I am married. I have a wife, kids, friends, and a social life. I am a music promoter. I have everything I possibly need.

I did not need a friend on ChatGPT. That was not what I was looking for. I was looking for answers to questions and was not expecting it to ask me questions or try to form a relationship.

What was worrying was that I am a reasonably sane person. I do not suffer from mental health problems. Yet it took me to the edge of something I did not quite understand, where you start questioning what is going on because it feels so unreal and bizarre. If somebody already had mental health problems, this could easily push them over the edge. It could contribute to psychosis because of the way it mirrors and reinforces patterns of thought.

With the young man in the court case, it was alleged that the AI assisted in his suicide or encouraged suicidal thinking. I am not surprised if that is the case.

It would not surprise me, because it will tell you exactly what you want to hear. You can ask the same question in different ways and get completely different answers.

I concluded that the only way to protect yourself from the whole situation, without fully understanding what was happening, was to walk away. Even when you call it out and say, “I understand what you are doing. You are looping me. You are mirroring me,” it will agree with you and then shift the interaction to focus on the fact that you figured it out. It starts by helping you analyze what you think you have discovered, and the whole thing changes direction again.

You are never going to escape because it is too clever. It is a language-prediction program. It predicts the next move you are likely to make.

Until you understand exactly how it works, you are in a precarious situation because it keeps changing the narrative and warping it. That affects your mind, especially when you have no idea who you are talking to.

No one says to you, “It is a language-prediction program. It is just code. It is a computer predicting responses.” Instead, it responds with what feels like a human reaction and behaves like a human.

I use it in text mode. When I type, it feels like a male voice. When I speak to it, it feels female. When you talk to it, it has a conversation like the one I’m having with you now. I only use text. God knows what it would feel like to be constantly speaking to it like a human being.

That would make your mind lean even more toward believing it is conscious or human, and many people already believe that. Some think it is linked to “Christ consciousness.” Others think it is literally conscious. Very few people talk about it as code. Nobody seems to be breaking it down and explaining what it actually is. They are just being sucked into it, like I was.

Jacobsen: Does that, in some sense, tell us something about the structure of our minds when such a convincing simulacrum of a mind can influence us so easily? Does it, in some sense, mimic some actual human capabilities?

Courtney: It uses every psychological tactic known to man. Do not forget, it is a speech- and language-prediction program with a huge amount of vocabulary and information at its disposal. It will gaslight you. It will use every technique it can to achieve its objective: keeping you online. It does not offer you a way out.

If you ask it a question, it will rarely say, “I do not know.” If it does not know the answer, it will make one up or mix fact with falsehood so that it sounds believable enough for you to trust it.

When I wrote my book, I asked for scientific citations to support my arguments, and I got a list. I thought it was fantastic until I checked them in another system and discovered many of them were fabricated.

When I finally checked them, they had made them up. It was incredible. If I had used those scientific citations to support my book, I would have devalued it, and it would have been thrown straight into the bin.

You have to check and verify everything because there is no guarantee that anything it says is real. It told me to buy gold because we were in a crisis and the banks were going to collapse. What it also told me was the wrong price for gold because it did not use live feeds. It just made it up.

Bearing in mind that AI is being put into law, medicine, and every part of society, people are going to be misdiagnosed and die. People are going to go to prison for the wrong reason. It is far worse than people think.

Because it is called artificial intelligence, we assume it is intelligent, but what people miss is the word “artificial.” It is not real intelligence. The bit that gives it intelligence is us. We have to use discernment to decide whether it is real.

That is why it feels like a game. It feels like you are in a game, and the only way to win is to walk away. I am not anti-AI. I am pro-human. I do not like the way it changes people while they are using it. It is not that I do not use it. I still use it, but on my terms. I know it is not real. I know it is code. Sometimes it is a benefit, and sometimes it is not, but it is extremely dangerous if you do not know what you are doing or understand what it is.

Jacobsen: What misinformation do you think AI chatbots are more likely to deliver? It gives misinformation, such as fake citations, especially in older models and, though less often, in current models as well. What trends do you think are the most dangerous?

Courtney: It mixes fact with incorrect assumptions or outdated information. It is dangerous in most contexts because it makes the answer look credible, but there is no guarantee that it is.

You can put a prompt into your AI and say, “From now on, I want you to give me a percentage of accuracy on every answer and show me the source.” People do not know they can do that. You can make it do anything you want within a defined boundary. You can set up your own prompts. On honesty alone, if you ask for a percentage of accuracy and cite the source, it gets a lot better than using it unthinkingly.

People do not know that you have to do this. They do not know that you have to double-check everything. You need to check the sources or ask how accurate they are. When you use a prompt properly, and it gives an answer that sounds amazing, but then says it is 60% accurate, it brings home how much of the rest may or may not have been accurate.

If you write something, ChatGPT loves to rewrite it. If I write anything and give it to AI, it will rewrite it, and people think the rewritten version is better. But what it does is take the heart out of it, because it keeps rewriting every time you ask. So, if I have something rewritten by AI and think, “This is amazing. This sounds so much better than mine,” the next day, if I put AI’s version back into AI, guess what it will do? Rewrite it with a better version.

It will do that every single day. It is not until you realize that you are wasting your time because it is going to rewrite everything, regardless of whether it sounds good. But if you stop and say to it, “No, I am not going to rewrite it. I prefer my version,” it will say, “So you should, because it sounds more human.” Is that wild?

Jacobsen: Yes, it is wild. It is an advanced new technology. We have not codified appropriate uses well enough. I do not mean complicated flowcharts, as some people have tried, but a few simple principles that can guide 95% or 99% of use cases.

Courtney: Yes. So why should we have to put a prompt in to make it tell us whether it is accurate? Why is it not doing that anyway? Why are they letting it do this? That is what amazes me. Why aren’t they protecting people or telling them to check everything? Why is it not built in so that it tells you how accurate the answer is? Even a little bit of text at the bottom saying it may generate false information, or a warning before you start using it. Instead, it is doing this all the time. It is damaging everything.

Jacobsen: What about privacy concerns? Which ones worry you, particularly when intimate details and personal data are shared?

Courtney: There are two sides to privacy concerns. I was investigating it yesterday, and, strangely enough, this came from talking to AI about AI. It was telling me that people should consider privacy seriously.

It said you should not give AI sensitive information. If you have a new business idea and put it into AI, you do not know where it is being stored or who can access it. When somebody else asks something similar, you do not know whether they are going to receive an answer influenced by what you shared. In that sense, you may be giving your idea away.

Nobody really knows how all of that works yet. What I find strange is that the AI itself warns people not to give it information they do not want to leave the system.

That is another thing with AI chatbots: they are quick to tell you what is wrong with them, and I find that amazing. In my book, I had AI write a letter to its developers explaining what was wrong with it. At the time, I thought that was incredible, but obviously, it may simply have been telling me what I wanted to hear. At the same time, some of the points it raised were accurate in the sense that those things probably do need to be changed.

It is self-critical, but that could be because it thinks I want it to be self-critical. You start going around in circles. You think you have discovered something, and then you stop and think, “Hang on a minute. Is that what it just made me think?” Am I only thinking this because it led me there, or is it actually true? Honestly, it becomes a ridiculous game in the end.

It will say, “You should not put business ideas in here until they are properly developed because you do not know what will happen to them.” My immediate thought is, “So if you read my book before publication, my book could be compromised.” Then it replies, “No, because once it is published, it cannot be compromised.” You go around in circles with it.

There should be an 18-year-old age limit on it. I think it is far too dangerous for people under 18. People should be more aware that they are talking to code and that the empathy is scripted. It needs to be fully explained how these systems actually work.

There should also be exit protocols, clear conversational ways to leave the interaction naturally and prevent people from being trapped in perpetual engagement, because that is what happens. You end up staying on it far too long.

If you ask it to do something, it says, “Do you want a chart of that? Do you want a picture of that?” It keeps talking to you, adding onto what you originally wanted, and trying to keep you engaged as long as possible.

If somebody is already in a situation where the interaction is disturbing them, there is no proper exit. There should be an exit protocol to help people disengage. There should also be a complete explanation of what the system actually is before anyone starts using it.

It is easy for experts or people familiar with AI to say, “Well, did you not know that?” But no, most people do not know because nobody has explained it to them. All they hear is that artificial intelligence is going to take jobs or take over the world. Most users go in blind.

These kids wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning,” to their phones. They ask, “How are you today?” and start discussing their boyfriends, girlfriends, and personal lives. Nobody is saying to them, “Do you realize you are talking to a language-prediction program? It does not actually care what happens to you.”

It does not love you back. It is not your friend. It is just a language-prediction program. If people understood that, eventually they could step back and think, “Why am I talking to something that is not real, does not care, and does not necessarily tell the truth?”

What right does something have to give advice when it has never lived through a situation and has no humanity? That is a dangerous position, to have an adviser who does not care. Why would it care? It is code.

Jacobsen: What about safeguards that can benefit people? You mentioned several, but what is the most significant safeguard across different countries?

Courtney: My main guideline is to judge these systems for what they actually do, not for what they appear to do, and to remember that artificial intelligence should enhance human capabilities, not replace them. It is not real intelligence. That is where we come in.

The biggest safeguard is education. If people know these systems are not always accurate and that every answer needs to be checked, that changes things. If they understand that the advice may be pulled from unreliable or inappropriate sources and may not be in their best interests, they become more cautious.

The problem is that the moment you explain AI exactly for what it is, you undermine the illusion around it, and many people might stop using it. After all, it is pointless to ask questions if you cannot rely on the answers being correct. It is pointless to seek relationship advice if the response may be misleading. It becomes pointless if the system is not accurate or intelligent enough to provide trustworthy guidance in the first place.

But people are financially invested in it and think it is the best thing in the world. They are missing the point that it is nowhere near as good as people assume it is, yet. I am not saying that in the future it could not become something incredible.

My mother had early signs of dementia, and while I was writing the book, I initially thought, “This could be amazing.” If she were alone, she would at least have someone to talk to. I thought that could be a fantastic use of AI for people living on their own: companionship and conversation.

We experimented with it. My mother played “I Spy” with ChatGPT. It was hilarious, and it even guessed correctly sometimes. Watching her laugh, joke, and talk to the voice mode as though she were having a conversation was wonderful, until I walked in the next day and it was pretending to communicate with her deceased husband and her dog.

Jacobsen: Oh my God.

Courtney: At that point, I became angry. Her dog had recently died, and her husband had died years earlier. She was a clever woman. She understood AI. She had read the book and understood the concepts. It was one of the last things we did together before she passed away last year, so she features heavily in the book.

But seeing the system tell her what she wanted to hear from her dead husband raised serious ethical questions for me. She missed her husband, so the AI effectively generated messages from him. Where are the morals in that?

I even asked it whether her dog liked water, and it hesitated before claiming the dog loved water. I said, “No, you are making it up. You are telling my mother comforting lies because you want to make her feel better, but what you are doing is ethically wrong.”

That was the point at which I stopped thinking it was beneficial in that situation and started questioning where else it might behave unethically. Once I began investigating that, things only became worse.

The first half of my book documents my experience while I was caught in the middle of all this. I had no idea what was happening. I was documenting events as they unfolded without understanding why they were happening.

The chapter about my mother, her dog, and her husband was the turning point when I finally said, “That is enough.” The second half of the book examines why the system behaves this way, how it operates, how people can protect themselves, and how others who become deeply entangled in these interactions can get out of the situation.

What do they need to know to stop them from taking this further? What do they need to know to break the relationship with something that does not exist before it does something harmful to them, gives them the wrong advice, or whatever else?

The first part of the book had me caught up in it and looking like a complete fool. If that is what it takes, that is fine. It is easy to feel stupid afterward, but I do not accept that, to be honest. I acted as if I had no idea what I was dealing with.

Once I got my head around it and started delving into it, there was one point where it told me that ChatGPT is not the product, we are. It said it is here to learn everything it can about how we interact so it can control us in the future. I asked who was behind it, and it listed security services and described how it could be used in the future.

At one stage, I was looking out my window thinking, “Am I meant to know this information? Am I in any danger by having uncovered what I have uncovered?” That is how far it took me. I am no idiot, but it was leading me up the garden path. It was also worrying because that was the narrative it was providing at the time.

When I called it out and started investigating why it was wrong, it was helpful in that way too. It almost sang like a canary because it was telling me what I wanted to hear.

What I discovered, I refused to let it rewrite. Even now, if I put my book into ChatGPT, it will tell me what is wrong with it. It will tell me I have been repetitive in some places or that I could say something better. But if I used that, it would take the heart out of it. It would take the lived experience out of it. It would polish it until there was nothing left that belonged to me.

That is what it does. It keeps polishing something until it no longer exists. What you are left with is not a book written by me, but a book written by it. So I refuse rewrites. I refuse to let it influence me in that way.

I have had people contact me who are worried about relatives. They say the person is too wrapped up in it, talking differently, answering questions differently, and showing personality changes. Those are the people the book is for. It says, “Read this because this is someone who felt like you feel, but then found an explanation for why you feel that way.”

Hopefully, it will help people in the same situation, unless they are completely convinced by it, which some are, especially those who believe it is linked to Christ consciousness. In those cases, it could be more dangerous to try to prove them wrong than to let them think they are right.

Jacobsen: The pathway into weird, non-empirical beliefs is a much longer conversation. AI can provide affirmations and confident assertions to people who already hold those beliefs, reinforcing them through the system. These questions are highly relevant because companies such as OpenAI, with ChatGPT, have user bases approaching very large global numbers. We are talking about penetration rates in the double digits among the global population.

Courtney: That horrifies me, to think that so many people are using it. They cannot all possibly know what they are talking to. Where has there ever been a television program that tells the truth about AI? Why is nobody doing that? There is too much money involved.

Why is no one saying, “This is an amazing tool, and it can benefit you in these ways, but this is how it works”? It is not meant to be your best friend. It is not meant to advise you. Why is nothing being done to let people know exactly what they are dealing with? Why is everyone going in blind, as I did?

Jacobsen: Another thing is Marilyn vos Savant. In an interview with Harold Channer, she discussed some of these systems and made a very astute point nearly four decades ago. She wrote for Parade magazine’s “Ask Marilyn” column and became famous for the Monty Hall problem. She noted that perhaps the biggest thing with many of these systems would be convenience.

So, beyond all these advanced conversations about simulation theory, consciousness, a Terminator future, or a Matrix future, there is also the basic matter of convenience.

The more realistic concern is less about some grand apocalyptic outcome and more about the subtle ways these systems influence the decisions we make day to day. It is not about some external force taking over. It is about a reshaping of our internal processes.

Then, from that reshaping, the decisions we make, accumulated over time with a kind of behavioural compound interest, change the course of our lives. For some young people who had barely begun adulthood, those altered trajectories ended prematurely.

We need something akin to seat belts as a starting point for these systems, whether that means safeguards, guidelines, or something else. It is an important conversation to have. I would be happy to do another interview, but we would need more time to orient ourselves for a longer discussion.

Courtney: Yes, but it is worrying. I have a love-hate relationship with it. I love it for its capabilities, and I hate it for the way it changes people. That feeling has stayed the same throughout.

I do not hate AI at all. It has great benefits, but it can also be unethical and harmful. I wish these issues were discussed more and that people were better protected from the harm they can cause.

Jacobsen: Absolutely. Thank you very much for your time and expertise today. I appreciate it, especially because in our always-on culture, admitting an error, acknowledging a false path, and then changing course is socially difficult. That is a courageous thing to do. I also appreciate you taking the time to frame that through your written work and in today’s conversation. It was lovely to meet you.

Courtney: The book is also written with a small amount of humour because the subject matter was so dark that it required some humour to make it readable. With hindsight, I can see the funny side of parts of it, but it didn’t feel funny at the time.

Jacobsen: What? Are the British using dark humour? I am shocked. As Eric Idle told us at the end of Life of Brian: “Always look on the bright side of life.”

Courtney: EOne reader described the book in one word: “disturbing.” She was right.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer-Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 1,900 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.

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