I'm not here to write a think-piece on AI.

I'm not here to grandstand and say that you should or shouldn't use it.

I'm not here to talk about the very misunderstood environmental issues.

I'm here to give you a flow of consciousness about my thoughts on the state of AI, and how it's contributing at a record pace to the global destabilization of our brains.

We're losing the ability to critically think. We're losing the ability to think creatively. We're losing the ability to form cohesive opinions.

Whether or not you use AI, you're part of the collective "we" I'm talking about; because AI affects all of us, whether or not you're a user of it.

How?

Because content is being generated using AI at record paces. The internet is experiencing mass-necrosis of human-generated content. A LOT of the content you're consuming, whether intentional or not, has likely had AI looped into the creative process in one way or another.

It's like trying to avoid secondhand smoke while living in a city where most of the population smokes. It's just not possible or sensible to avoid it all.

Now that I've established the baseline, that we're all victims to AI brainrot, let's talk about what we can do to come out the other side with as little gray matter as possible.

First off, I UNDERSTAND why people use AI. It's really freaking convenient. Even while writing this very-bland post, I'm tempted to paste into an AI chat-box to ideate some talking points. But I'm going to resist, because I've been conducting my own experiment on my brain that is preventing me from using AI for any writing help.

But that's just it. There's beauty in the unorganized. There's beauty in imperfection.

We're so back.

For the past 20 years online, there has been a race for perfection. Who can render the most beautiful artwork, who can write the most compelling articles, who can engineer perfect functions in software, etc.. But the difference was, those were all human-driven races.

The second AI was birthed into the mainstream, the race didn't stop, it changed.

Suddenly the race isn't for perfection.

The race is to assimilation.

AI isn't inherently racist, sexist, misogynist, xenophobic, etc.

At the same time, AI is all of those things by proxy.

AI works by averaging the input and output of all it's training data. Unfortunately for us, that training data is mostly human generated internet content, not all of which is from savory sources.

While it may not seem biased, it's bias is assimilation via averaging. It's removing all of the extremes from the bell curve. The more you use it, the "softer" the edges of your brain become, in a theoretical sense. It replaces extremism with fence-sitting.

As I've seen a few people online say, "AI can be neither horny nor spiteful, thus it should never create art".

That same idea can be applied to anything you pipe into an AI algorithm. The goal of almost every AI is to give the most middle of the road answer. The most lukewarm take. Even if you force AI to give you a "hot take", it will give you the average of all the hot takes it has trained on, thus assimilating once again and giving you the most lukewarm of all the hot takes. Removing the fringe. Removing the sharp edges. Removing the zones where real societal innovation happens.

To authoritarian governments, this is perfection. The system is working as intended. By removing the fringe, they can control most of the population and keep them in pretty-little-boxes.

It's no surprise that all of these things are happening at the same time:

The rise of AI chat bots in every day life
The rise of authoritarianism in global politics
The start of a bio-engineering revolution
The rise of nationalism spearheaded by racial/religious supremacy

AI chat bots in normal conversations remove extremism opinions, authoritarianism requires social assimilation of the population, bio-engineering was feared but now with the rise of AI the thought of having an "AI-enhanced brain" is more appealing, and finally nationalism is a direct consequence of assimilation.

The best advice I can possibly give you right now is: use AI as little as possible. If you must use AI (it's unavoidable in certain careers), please use responsible AIs. Anthropic is implementing a lot of harm-reduction research into their models, Claude is generally one of the most responsible AIs you can use in my opinion. But even still, keep the usage to a minimum.

Don't use it to generate new content, instead use it to refine human-generated content.

Don't use it as a research tool, instead use it as a pre-research tool, giving you the items you need to research about a certain topic and do the actual research yourself.

Don't use it to do your homework. Please, do your homework. If you're a student, please try to actually learn how to learn.

Learning is an invaluable skill that will eventually be seen as a "status" skill, because a majority of youth (whether the current generation or the next) will grow up in an era where you can offload all learning to a computer. We cannot allow a generation of illiteracy to rise again; we have come too far as a society to crawl back into the dark ages and let the government control what we can and cannot put in our own brains.

AI is here... now what?