Is AI Ruining Us, or Are We Overreacting?
· EN #contemplation #ai
AI didn’t create the habit of blind trust — it amplified it. The right question isn’t whether AI is good or bad, but what stance I am bringing to it.
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of pieces with titles like “AI Is Making Us Dumber,” “AI Is Manipulating Cognition,” “I Hacked ChatGPT in 20 Minutes,” “AI Is Killing Critical Thinking,” and so on. Every headline is loud. Every argument sounds plausible. But after reading enough of them, I noticed something: we’re talking about AI more than we’re being honest about ourselves.
Does AI have bad effects? Yes.
The clearest harm isn’t that AI gets things wrong. Wrong can be fixed. The real harm is that AI has made the feeling of understanding cheap. Someone who has never studied a field can produce, in half a minute, a paragraph that sounds deep. A vague intuition in your head, once AI rewrites it, immediately reads like a major conclusion. AI doesn’t produce experts at scale. It produces the sensation of expertise at scale. Those two are different, and it’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart.
That’s real. I’m not defending AI.
But people are also making too much of a lot of things.
There’s a well-known piece about a journalist who set up a fake website for a hot-dog-eating championship, waited a few days, and then wrote “I Hacked AI in 20 Minutes.” That wasn’t hacking. It was exploiting an architectural weakness in a retrieval system. But the word “hack” sells clicks. The bigger the headline, the higher the read count. AI isn’t really the protagonist here. It’s the pretext.
And there are plenty of other articles about AI “manipulating” this person, “deceiving” that one, “wrecking” someone else. The real question they avoid is: why does a grown adult absolutely trust a tool the first time they touch it, with no verification at all? Blaming AI is always easier than looking at yourself.
But really, the center of this problem isn’t AI.
Before AI existed, people trusted Google absolutely. They trusted books absolutely. They trusted a particular teacher, a particular newspaper. AI didn’t create the habit of blind trust. It just amplified it.
AI is like a large mirror. It magnifies both the user’s knowledge and the user’s delusions. The ratio between those two is decided by the user, not by AI. Those who come to it with an attitude of scrutiny leave with knowledge. Those who come seeking validation leave with delusion, polished.
Responsibility here has two layers. The makers of AI are accountable for the design. The users of AI are accountable for the use. The two layers don’t cancel each other — they add up.
And here’s the part I have to say plainly.
This essay falls inside the scope it’s discussing. I wrote it with my own thinking, but with AI beside me. It can also be skimmed and leave you with a feeling of having understood — when really, it’s just a feeling. If you finish reading and decide I’m right, you may have walked into the exact trap I just described.
The only way out is not to trust me. You have to think it through yourself, verify it yourself, and ask yourself which claims in this essay carry weight and which are just words.
And I’ve noticed there’s one question almost no one bothers with.
Before interacting with anything — AI, a colleague, a lover, a family member — very few people deliberately answer this question: What is my stance toward this entity?
Most people leave the question on default and handle it unconsciously. The way no one thinks about air quality as long as they’re breathing fine.
When the question goes unanswered, the stance drifts. One day, AI is a confidant. The next, it’s a Google that talks back. The week after, it’s a threat to humanity. The same person, three different stances in a short stretch of time, depending on mood and on whichever article they happened to read last.
That isn’t AI’s fault. That’s a person who hasn’t finished setting their own stance.
The right question isn’t “Is AI good or bad?” The right question is: What stance am I bringing to it? I answer that for myself. You answer it for yourself. No one can answer it for you.
— Plone Mraz —