About a year ago I made a post on LinkedIn stating that AI is useless. I deleted it, as I felt I was overly harsh on good people who were early adopters in a way that made me uncomfortable, but was unable to maturely articulate. Someone responded that they could not wait for an update in a year, so why not; here we go! This one is for you, person I do not know or remember.

I was wrong. AI is absolutely incredible at accelerating the primary goal of the ruling class: Wage suppression and human devaluation. Why pay an artist to paint for days when the magic robot box can make you a funny picture with little more than a sentence and in less time than it takes to brew a cup of coffee?

Am I blameless? Not entirely - in 2022 I used AI to generate cover art for my song "The Drifter". Prior to that, I paid artist friends of mine. In 2024, I began writing on various topics and I briefly experimented with using AI to proofread and edit. Initially, I was enthralled with the results. It wasn't until I went back and re-read my original writing that I understood what was happening. AI was diluting my voice. My writing was no longer 100% me, but rather a washed out imitation rinsed by the average of all human writing used to train the model. The reason it seemed better to me was not because it was objectively better, but because my inner critic was silent since I was no longer reading MY writing.

The worst part is that it appears to be getting quite good at masking underlying problems. I know workers who have, for better or for worse, increased their output 10x and beyond. I know of others who feed in conversations and bullet points to generate work tasks overflowing with content. They no longer need to fully understand the task they are delegating because the output is, at first glance, quite polished. Unfortunately, the quantity of content masks the poor quality. These tasks are often ill-defined, and the burden falls on the workers to dig through to understand what is being requested.

...Oh - I guess that wasn't the worst part, because I have a sense that before long, workers will be required to use AI or they will be punished. Not because they are not hard workers or good at what they do, but because there is a vast misconception that "person" will always be less than "person + AI". That everyone is faster and better if they utilize AI. God forbid someone be unwilling to fall in line and embrace a tool that has been shown to reduce critical thinking skills in its users. Which brings me to the conclusion of whatever you want to call this:

Is the real reason we're seeing such a push for AI adoption because it actively makes us dumber? The ineffective American education system was designed intentionally not to create a population of critical thinkers able to dissect the misinformation peddled by those who wish to subjugate us, but to create simple and obedient workers. George Carlin said it better than I ever could:

"They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it."

Thank you.

« Back