Honestly I’m pretty sure he was already in decline back then. If you dig up old interviews with him from the 80s/90s, he was still an egomaniacal dumbfuck but he was at least somewhat articulate. If you can stomach enough of the fucker to watch all 3 in a row you can pretty much watch his brain turn to soup.
I genuinely suspect he was diagnosed with dementia around the time of that “man, person, woman, camera” incident. Usually when neuropsychological testing like that is done, they do several tests, not just one. One test that is typically given along with is the clock drawing test, which can be highly indicative of dementia. Given the everything about his personality, if he did not brag about drawing the best clock they’d ever seen…I would guess he had some pretty damn concerning results on that bit.
Honestly at this point I’m kind of thinking it’s both - it started out as a planned distraction but being the pair of thin skinned narcissistic man children they are, they both just lost the fucking plot.