AI is a trick that will eventually exploit you hard

AI, as we think of Today is just a free trial. Even if you’re paying for it.

It’s a trick. I’m starting to see it now.

But Michal, it’s not free! It’s 20 bucks!

Trust me $20 is still a free trial.

The price is there to trick you its not free. And it’s „reasonable”, right? Not too expensive. And you get SO much more productive.

It’s a no-brainer.

Also literally.

The MIT study

There was a MIT Study done recently called „Your Brain on Chat GPT”. They scanned the brains of people who used LLMs for creative writing. Mostly essays. Compared the results to a group that didn’t use AI at all.

While the researchers try to stress out that it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re „getting dumber”, the results kinda speak for themselves.

Brain scans revealed the damage: neural connections collapsed from 79 to just 42. That’s a 47% reduction in brain connectivity.

There’s reduced cognitive engagement, less neural activity, impaired memory and recall. And that’s just the beginning.

83.3% of ChatGPT users couldn’t quote from essays they wrote minutes earlier.

People didn’t know what they wrote about. It’s like a total amnesia when they used AI to „help them write”.

They also didn’t really feel like they were the authors of the article anymore. Which makes sense. They weren’t.

Instead of getting from a problem to a solution, using a brain process, we skip most of it and get to a result. Without thinking.

Cognitive decline

It all leads to the trick of cognitive debt and that will tie into a business model that will exploit you very soon.

The more you’re used to „getting stuff faster”, the more addictive it gets. Thinking is transformed into a chore. Like heavy lifting. Manual labor.

Time to get rid of thinking once and for all! This perception is in essence anti-human and driven by the same thing most things are driven.

Money.

Using AI right now feels like playing on cheat codes.

You do stuff faster, way more efficiently. It’s like magic. The LLMs especially, have become an integral part of our lives. People use them for everything.

Searching information? Sure. Writing an email? Obviously!

But even things like replying to a friend’s emotional message in a tone that makes it look like you care.

It’s very easy to get lost in that increased productivity.

But you’re cognitively reversing. Getting dumber may be a bit oversimplified and exaggerated, but generally it’s that direction.

You’re not becoming a superhuman. You’re becoming a faster monkey that does random stuff and hopes for results.

And you’re less and less able to process whether the results even make sense anymore so you accept stuff as it is.

I talked about this for a while now. AI makes us less critical both of ourselves and of it. It’s so magical, that we decide to turn a blind eye to some potential shortcomings. It’s good enough.

Always just good enough.

You feel more productive, but you’re not problem solving anymore. Not stimulating the brain. And when you need to use your brain, you don’t want to. You crave for an LLM to come and save you.

Do the thinking for you.

That’s why it’s a free trial – even if paid. Making it completely free would raise questions of ethics. Of learning from you to exploit you.

But because you pay, you don’t care anymore. It’s „a tool” you say to yourself. It makes me better.

Does it?

I’ve heard stories about developers who were solving simple 15 minute problems by paing $10 extra for a coding AI to do it for them.

Those AI companies rely on that mechanism. They want you to do as much as possible in their tools, losing your own ability to do stuff.

Because ultimately you’ll only be able to do it with them. Total control. Without your AI you’re nothing.

And then they’ll raise their prices. BIG time. Some of those AI coding tools already did that – unexpectedly. They know they can.

Some models are already $300-$400 per month! And people pay that!

But it’s not the end. The more cognitively detached you become, the more they’ll be able to charge you.

You will PAY to think. Enjoy!

Why?

The FOMO rat race

We subconsciously feel we’re on the verge of some big change. Likely a bad one.

People desperately want to get ahead in life even a little bit. Just to be in a safer spot when „it” hits. Whatever it is.

Raise of the machines? World War 3? Alien invasion? Replacing 99% of workforce with robots?

All of the above?

I can see it everywhere. Everyone wants to be an influencer or rich, or both. Because they feel like it’s the only path to potentially avoid the doom & gloom. And AI is like a golden ticket out of it.

But is it? Or is it just a ruse to get you addicted to paying more with a fake promise of greatness? We can’t have 8-billion successful people after all.

It’s a rat race. Desperate. Sad. And I’m also in it. I try to detach from that but it’s hard.

I’m also building some AI tools to see where it gets me, but the more I think about it, the more I try to sneak in the human touch into them. And make them more of a mix, than one sided.

But I do see I’m part of the problem too. I don’t want to get left behind in a world that is running towards us at an increasing pace.

How AI should be used?

I’m not some anti-technology luddite. AI is an amazing technology that could change the world for the better.

The problem is that it won’t.

It CAN. But it won’t.

That’s because there’s more money in monthly payments – at least for as long as people still have jobs. And after that? Who knows, maybe we’ll get universal basic income and live pointless lives like in the Idiocracy movie.

Play videogames all day and slowly fade into depression and despair.

I think we’re using AI wrong.

It should not be available to the public to do basic thinking. It shouldn’t summarise books for you. It shouldn’t write blog posts for you.

It should be a tool for scientists to expand their capabilities, but also with a ban on basic stuff so they keep their minds sharp. It should analyse huge data sets and provide insights.

Yes, it can greatly help in healthcare. Energy. Peace negotiations. Pollution.

The problems that are plaguing the planet right now.

Instead we use it to generate a dancing aligator with a brainrot soundtrack.

No wonder the square peg won’t fit in the round hole. But we only have a brief moment to still grasp WHY it won’t fit.

Will this happen?

Do you think it’s gonna play out like that? The more I look around the more I see all patterns pointing to that.

We’re getting dumber because we desperately want to get ahead of the future. And that future is approaching to bite us in the ass.

And without the AI to explain the pain to us, we’ll be clueless and helpless.

The future of technology is so exciting, isn’t it?

The more I think of it, the more resetting from tech with some adventures sounds like a plan to keep it at a healthy level.