Before I begin, everything stated in this post is my opinion and I have no statistical evidence to prove anything. So take my opinion with a grain of whatever gives you your high. I might hold certain biases, so I’m going to say a few things about me so you have more detail on how to weigh the points I pass across in this blog post.

I’m a software developer, so if you can’t already tell, my domain of expertise has been at risk since the dawn of copilot and the likes. But I assure you, that’s not why I’m writing this. I use AI at work with heavy supervision & review because companies need you to ship faster these days or you’re out the window. On my personal projects, I try not to use it at all except I need to find some crazy bug and I’ve been stuck for a while, and if I do use it for anything other than diagnostics, I’m generating snippets or project boilerplates.

I use AI to do analysis and get insights on fields I’m about to explore or things I’m about to learn. I’ve been against AI in my editor since copilot and I never actually used copilot, but I’ve used AI (via cursor) in my editor since it got better because it was mandated at work. That being said, my articles are not written by AI.

The public’s introduction to Apple of Eden

I remember seeing this tweet when it dropped and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It was a fun tool I played around with and I remembered it felt like a nice tool to summarize knowledge and get specific answers to questions without running around on the internet. It didn’t always work well, it didn’t exactly feel smart at the time, and that was okay.

Back then it felt like a toy. You’d ask it something dumb and it would give you a surprisingly coherent answer and you’d laugh and show your friends. It was novel, not threatening. Except for those that could see the future, nobody was talking about AGI or job displacement or the death of the web.

Fast forward a couple years and that same toy is being shoved into everything. Your search engine, your documents, your photo library, your phones, your operating system, your girlfriend, and your fridge… once someone figures out how. It stopped being a thing you choose to use and became a thing that must be there regardless of whether you wanted it to be or not. And with that shift, the vibe changed.

AI is good

To deny that AI has tons of benefits and has been a really helpful tool is to deny that sugar is sweet. Medical research just got a shot in the arm because AI can actually read medical images and find tumors faster than some radiologists. Protein folding, drug discovery, real time translation breaking down language barriers, these are not nothing.

For a blind person, AI describing the world through a camera is basically a superpower. There’s genuine good here, and pretending otherwise is just as dumb as the people who think AI can do no wrong.

AI is cancer

To deny that AI does more damage to society and humanity as a whole is to deny that sugar can be bad for your health when you ingest lots of it, and to be fair, most of all the bad things I have to say about AI are especially pointing to generative AI.

I’m not gonna say “in the earlier days of the internet”, because just 4 years ago, you could search something on the internet and you could be sure that any site you choose to read from had the content written by a person, and everyone had different opinions taste and you could find content that suits your needs.

** “Did you use AI for this?”

If you’re an artist, writer or an expert in any creative field, you must have gotten this question for at least every piece of work you put out there. Somehow everyone seems to have developed mass amnesia and forgot that humans were capable of jaw dropping feats before the release of AI.

It’s now expected that every little thing has to hold a >90% stake in its creation. For something as little as writing an essay, a single well formed paragraph, or damn! a nice letter to your friend wishing him a happy birthday! It’s beyond sickening, it’s like we seem to be losing IQ points every single day. And this NEVER helps those who are learning, it’s more damage than it’s worth, because why learn X when AI can do X, Y, Z? The simple ability to reason is being offloaded to a third party tool you pay $20-$200/m for, sad.

The Human factor

Everybody says “AI won’t replace you, but a person using AI will.” or “AI wont replace you if you’re good enough”. But if we look closely at the trajectory of this technology, everywhere begins to “unblur”. It’s not just about job displacement, it’s about a fundamental shift in what it means to be human. AI is not just a tool, it can’t reason, but it seems to learn… at least by statistical inference and at a scale that no human can. If we blindly outsource every vital aspect of our existence to these systems, we aren’t just upgrading our workflow, we are volunteering to become the ultimate training data.

** The Atrophy of Thought

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud. Every time you reach for AI to write, think, or decide for you, you’re outsourcing a piece of yourself. You get the answer faster, but you lose the muscle, day by day, little by little, until it’s all gone. The ability to struggle through a problem, to be wrong, to arrive at something messy and yours, that compounds. And what grows in its place is dependence.

** Empathy & Illusion

This dependence is already creeping into our most sacred, vulnerable spaces. We are beginning to witness a real shift in our daily lives where AI is used as a surrogate for genuine human connection and empathy.

An alarming number of people are now turning to AI companions and algorithmic girlfriends/boyfriends for emotional fulfillment. Rather than navigating the vulnerability of human-to-human therapy and connection, we seem to be opting to use chatbots as therapists because it feels “embarrassment proof” or within reach.

I was able to put my laziness aside and actually do some research here. AI cannot feel, yet we are allowing it to simulate the active ingredients of human healing, empathy, and connection. When we trade the risk of real relationships for the safe, predictable comfort of an algorithm, we are not just using a tool. We are slowly replacing the very things that make us human.

AI, AI, Go away

Love it or hate it, it’s already here. There’s no no-AI anymore. US companies can’t stop working on the technology even if they are aware of the impending doom because, hell, the Chinese won’t stop so if we do stop, we’re just gonna be left behind.

That’s the trap, eh? We’ve turned a technological choice into an arms race. No company can afford to sit out because their competitor won’t. No country can afford to pause because the other won’t. So we all just keep sprinting toward a cliff together, each one afraid to be the first to stop.

The Future.

Unless we can go back to the past, I don’t have a hopeful ending here. I don’t have a plan or a call to action. Though that doesn’t mean the future is grim or this post is meant to come off as a doomsday warning. The cat is already out of the bag, the machine is already running, and none of us were asked if we wanted it turned on.

Maybe we regulate. Maybe we adapt. But one thing’s for sure, we will all wake up one day and realize we handed over the one thing that made us human… the need to try, to fail, to be imperfect, to reason, to figure it out ourselves.

Or maybe we just keep feeding it until there’s nothing left to feed, until there’s no human written content on the internet. Maybe then we’ll realize that the future is already here, and we’re not required.