ai is eating your brainzz!

i can’t count the amount of times that i have heard the phrase “i asked [llm] about this” or “let me ask [llm] and see what it says” just this past month. and yes, im purposely avoiding using its name but you know exactly what im referring to! i think from my reactions people assume im anti-ai or a hater of some kind but im not exactly mad about ai – im mad about how we are using it.

in the beginning, ai was simply an answer to the question “can machines think?” proposed by alan turing in 1950, and he claimed that if a machine can give an answer that can be confused for a human’s response, then it must be thinking. im sure you and i know exactly why this logic is flawed.

however, it is by that basis that modern llms are built upon: a mash-up of billions of different personas online fed into one machine that can reproduce by some probability a satisfying response. in a sense, it is imitation at its finest, so much so that ai psychosis has become a legitimate concern.

now, is it a problem that a chatbot can retrieve precisely the information you need whenever you need it? not exactly, but the bigger problem is that we blindly trust it. we were always skeptical of the information we read off the internet, especially from media sources that have some sort of bias in their narrative, but why do we not have the same skepticism with the bot?

i can think of one reason why that might be, so let me set the stage for you. you first enter the website, there’s a chat box and you ask it a question. the feeling is just like texting since it will understand regardless of the typing mannerism or typos you have in your text. when it responds (in which sometimes it gasses you up), it give you the answers in easy-to-read bullets and ends with asking you a question. you are intrigued by what this machine can do, and you keep chatting with it as the line between a tool and a friend starts to blur.

in short: we trust our friends, and we trust the familiar. it talks like a person, and so we assume it can also think like one and reason like one. but it does not. the way it works is very simple actually – it just predicts what the next word might be. for example, if i ask it “what year was michael jackson born?” and answer would be “michael jackson was born in…” and only after this part is where the ‘thinking’ kicks in. according to the immense data it digested, the next probable word would be “1958” simply because the numbers won. i assume now you can understand why it hallucinates, and why we should be skeptical of it even more.

but wait, that does not make sense, because if the bot ingested all the data from the internet, it certainly does not ‘speak’ like one! im sure you have heard of the countless shutdowns of bots because of how they picked up the trolling behavior of online users. so what does that mean? it means that the bot is tuned to express ideas with some sort of bias in its voice. we end up then with a company that has a puppet of a robot that people trust blindly – the perfect recipe for a propaganda machine!

now im not saying that the bot is actively being used to push out ideas, im just stating that it’s not at all surprising if it turns out that way one day and that we really need to be careful of what we consume. the key message that i want to convey is that we need to stop outsourcing our thinking to a machine. people are no longer able to have opinions without consulting a bot, and they are unable to state facts without checking with it either!

it is in our nature that we are lazy and that we like the easy way out, but it becomes a problem when we are too lazy to even think! i spent some time wondering what the solution to the reliance on ai is, but the answer to me is to just simply not use it too much. it always seems to me that relying on ai is a slippery slope that only gets steeper with time and it gets harder to climb out from when you’re too deep into it.

i want people to start appreciating their flaws even more and to strive to become better with their own efforts. it really takes away the joy of learning and progress when you take shortcuts all the time. you don’t have to cut off ai completely, but let it not be the first thought that comes to your mind when you want to do anything. i truly believe that you can achieve anything you set your mind to, if only you tried.

if you have any experiences with ai or interesting insights, let me know in the comments! i would love to read them (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶) and remember that you always have a choice in life, and that making the hard choices now will lead to an easier life later <3