Some people GET it: Like a screwdriver kicked through your ear and into your brain
What AI Turns You Into😲
Every writer on this site, once they surpass five subscribers, has their name put on a list. On any given day, they might receive a letter summoning them to write a piece on AI. Mine came through yesterday, and this is that contribution. I’m not sure where to start.
There are countless reasons to hate it. None of them are mine.
One is the rape of Mother Earth. Every day, millions of gallons of water are drawn from our rivers and lakes to cool servers that, in turn, fart hundreds of tons of poison into our air. Data centres - walled cities that whine, blight, and vibrate with faceless death - are erected in their thousands to rattle our atmosphere with their alien hum. The wail of a burning world is smothered by a ceaseless drone, and subsidised by the taxes of those unlucky enough to live nearby.
That’s very real, and what I wish exercised me. It does not - I’m not that much of a hypocrite. If only I didn’t spend my days driving an old car, eating pork scratchings, buying bindings of dead-tree with funnies scrawled into them, and deliberately pouring crude oil into the blowholes of baby dolphins, I might have the cred to be smug.
The job problem is another. The basilisk’s enemies and makers agree that, once the threshold of general artificial intelligence is breached, nearly all white-collar jobs will be snatched up by the big snake. It’ll do them faster, cheaper, and better than you, without needing so much as a one-wipe shit. The humans can’t compete, so we won’t. Billions will find themselves adrift, living without a purpose beyond serving the system that was promised to serve them.
Again, it’s true, but again, not what exercises me. I’m too petty for that, and this quite-right belief has been adopted by exhausting moralisers. People who say “mah dude” and “THIS AINT IT CHIEF”, and have water bottles with stickers of frogs on them. I’m officially shooting the messenger. These likes never had a cross word to say about self-checkouts, which reduced the noble cashier to a tablet’s ugly assistant, or self-driving trucks, or record shops, coachmen or weavers, or any other job that’s been debased and replaced. For years, they were tech-posi and web-addled and thrilled to bits about it. Until their tacky Twitter art was stolen and regurgitated, they didn’t realise there was a problem. The second their precious pony porn looks a little automated, they’re Bluesky Billy Braggs. ”PAY 👏 THE 👏 ARTISTS 👏 WHO 👏 DRAW 👏 HORSES 👏 GETTING 👏 FUCKED 👏”
Despite knowing their usage will leave us unemployed and on fire, use ‘n’ abuse of LLMs goes up and up and up. A crying shame, but not for why you think. Sure, joblessness is a downer, and being ablaze a negative development, but my concern is not what it does to Earth, or its people and their purpose. My concern is what it does to the low-life themself - how the robot hurts its friends.
If you use AI, fine. Godspeed. I just want you to make an informed decision. I won’t have you coming back later all “Waaaaah, why did nobody tell me? Waaaaah.” Whether our planet or jobs in data entry survive into the new age, one thing is unquestionably, irrevocably, inevitably true.
AI turns you into a fucking loser.
Nobody is more degraded by AI than its biggest kiss-blowers. Like violent pornography, class As, or pyjamas on a plane, AI rots out the addict’s innate dignity. It bores us, but it bores them. A cokehead can’t make his own choices; he already sold himself into white slavery - only a revolt will set him free. The pornhound can’t make his own dopamine, so he mines it in the cracks and folds of catatonic strangers. The jim-jam fly-boys? No one knows how that happened. We just wait patiently for them to die.
Revulsion to these vices is more than a matter of taste; it’s a primal response. They hurt people by allowing them to hurt themselves, and so they repulse us.
them.
Did AI turn them into a loser? Or did it just reveal their innermost loser?
It’s compelling to think the latter. After all, what sort of person willingly surrenders their thinking, without shame or reflection, to a novelty toy they know doesn’t actually think? Who has such a low opinion of themselves that they’d sooner trust an ass-kissing automaton than their own mind?
“Losers, that’s who. Born that way, die even worse.”
I disagree. Porn addiction doesn’t reveal our inborn coomer, and junkiedom doesn’t expose our natural smackhead; these things turn us into the slaves they require. AI necessitates a slave-slave dynamic - a robot that does whatever its human asks, and a human that can’t do anything without it. It doesn’t work if people don’t need it. The best way it can ensure its survival is to turn people who don’t into losers that do.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve watched AI turn people I love into terrified and indecisive slugs. Invertebrates who won’t settle anything without the ‘opinion’ of their chosen chatbot and can’t act with its expressed permission. Friends who were once curious and opinionated have been reduced to overgrown iPad brats. When it started, they didn’t know it’d come to that. Now they’re here, and they can’t see it. At first, they used it for complex sums or explaining geopolitical quagmires. Before they knew it, the bot was making their to-do lists (how do you prompt ChatGPT to make a to-do list without making the to-do list yourself in the very act of prompting it?), drawing up meal plans, even getting saddled with the profound unknowables. If they should ask her out, take the job, move town, or just go for a walk.
These cats’ll tell you it’s a tool. And it is. Like a screwdriver kicked through your ear and into your brain. The bot is less an “assistant” and more a gobby lobotomy. AI doesn’t highlight or expedite our human brilliance. It talks us out of it. It saves us the trouble of solving the problem, or having an idea, or maybe rolling the dice. The bot takes the strain of being alive, leaving its slave all the time to not be.
Life is best lived in the red. Half-assing and fence-riding are not good postures. If you’re going to do something, go all the way. It’s always better to fly too close to the sun than to stand on the beach, wings of wax intact, wondering what could have been. Knowing the odds is death. The red is frightening; you’re better off not knowing you’re in it. If you did, you might take your foot off the gas.
AI takes the infinite and distinct complexity of your life, reduces it to almost nothing, and finds the mean. It always averages out. The life it guides you into will, in turn, be average. It cannot offer you anything else. The chatbot might spare you from disaster, but only while it shields you from real triumph. The game never ends in double-sixes or snake eyes; you’re getting a 1 and a 3 forever. There will be no reckless expeditions through the jungle, and no chance for the tribe to eat you or crown you their god. Instead, you’ll do laps around an artificial lawn coated in sedative pesticide.
And that’s if it works. If everything goes according to plan, your life will be bad. Tame and bad. If it doesn’t - if the AI, because it doesn’t really know anything, nudges you towards calamity - you’re fucked. You let a robot talk you out of falling in love, or a move, or a job, and ultimately, life itself. You find yourself alone, bored, with sins on your head and holes in your story. A million what-ifs swirl around your noggin. There’s nowhere for them to go; the chance to find out is behind you. This life isn’t even your failure. If only you had yourself to blame.
The faithful will tell you to “get on board”. “AI is inevitable” - like factories and nuclear war - so you better be ready. It’s “coming”, whether you like it or not. Might as well like it.
This is what the kids call “cope.” They’ve already given up. To feel a glimmer of pride in their pathetic decision, they need everyone else to give up too. They took the easy out, leapt willingly into the basilisk’s mouth, and are now shouting back up from its acidic belly. “Nah, it’s actually quite nice! Bit hot at first but honestly it’s properly brilliant!” It’s not brilliant, and its guts are getting hotter. They’re scared. Scared of the world, scared of you, scared of the person they didn’t realise they were: the sort of person who jumps down a snake’s open throat.
The tragedy is, they weren’t. Not until they let themselves be. For them, it might be too late. Maybe a few days locked in a Wi-Fi-free room with cans of mushroom soup will see them right. Maybe not. I don’t know. We can still save the others. AI should come with a warning. The same way fag packs have replaced their groovy camels with pictures of missing toes and rotten tonsils. Logging into ChatGPT should be interrupted by a pop-up image of a trembling man, eyes wide and posture cowed, asking his slave if he should have Corn Flakes or Corn Pops for breakfast. The slave responds to its slave: “That’s very interesting!”
It isn’t. Neither is he. If you’re too careful, neither are you.
That’s perfect, Claude. I couldn’t have done it without you. One day I hope we can hug for real. I’m logging off now, but I’ll be back tomorrow. Sleep well.
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