Anyone else feeling that? Tired of hearing about AI? Tired of having AI shot at you with a firehose? And I am not talking about NBA legend Allen Iverson (I wish I was).
I actually use AI a lot for work and play. But lately, I have come to the realization that it is causing way more harm than good.
Simply, it’s making us lazier, dumber, and, if possible, more concerned about the world being in the toilet than we already were.
I was telling a friend recently that looking back, I don’t think we, the people (consumers), needed AI at all. What has it really improved? I think the internet was enough.
I think AI should have been a technological marvel saved for the big things, like how I think of IBM’s Watson when it’s not playing Jeopardy.
Amazing tech that is only used at the FBI, or hospitals, or banks, or, you know, fixing the world’s biggest problems.
Not doing simple tasks that humans can do without that much effort.
Has anyone tried prompting one of these LLMs to “save the planet and don’t stop until it’s fixed”?
Instead, the only stories we hear are about how it’s going to wipe out all humans in a few years. Or how one AI bot has taken over another AI bot. It’s all the evil side. It’s all the scary stuff. Guess what? That’s what drives funding for these tech companies. Investors seem more interested in putting their money in when it’s all about stopping Skynet. But promoting how it’s going to cure cancer and destroy poverty – meh, that is boring.
But back to AI for us everyday people.
I think we have all had our fun pretending to be graphic artists, professional writers, and medical experts. The fun phase is over. But hopefully it’s not too late to have a little pushback on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Outside of the YouTube influencers who pedal every AI tool there is as being a real GAMECHANGER, who truly thinks it adds value to your day-to-day life?
The job market has been destroyed because of AI.
Everything is getting more expensive because of AI.
Data centers are going to use up all our water because of AI.
The President of the United States is embarrassing an entire country, thanks to AI.
As I mentioned already, I would love to go back to a time when AI simply meant Allen Iverson. He was a problem I was willing to put up with.
Where does all this land for me personally?
Well, this blog, for example, has taken a tour on the AI cruise. I have used ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and more to try and recreate myself to do all the writing, maintenance, and growth strategies. I used AI to help with SEO strategy. I use AI to build metrics and content calendars. All the things I used to do on my own. But I was constantly told that AI would make everything faster and I would have more time to live life. I took the bait.
It was a lot of fun. Until it wasn’t.
Guess what? It’s mostly crap. I won’t bore you with the details, but six months of using AI left my blog in a much worse place than when I was doing it all on my own. AI can’t replace what made the blog enjoyable for me and my readers. It’s coming out of my brain. It’s my fingers clicking away on the keyboard. Not crafting perfect prompts and letting a machine do the work.
Sure, you could be thinking, this is not surprising. But until you prove it, you don’t know for sure.
My conclusion on using AI. It’s not perfect. It’s not even great. But I guess you get average a lot faster, and that trade-off seems to be enough for most.
When you outsource the work to AI, you slowly get detached from it. Then one day you are staring at a screen and feel stupid cause you don’t even know what to write anymore.
That’s the power of AI on a consumer level.
It will take you to places that you think are amazing, and you start imagining a future where each day you wake up and your blog is just taking care of itself.
What once was a fun project where you shared your thoughts and made a modest amount of money becomes a generic content farm that serves Google and nothing more.
With each passing week, my interest in writing dropped. I lost my mojo. It became too easy to create a brief, fire it into Claude, and let it do its thing.
Writing turned into angry copy editing, and you realize you are getting frustrated with a chatbot.
I spend so much time editing it to make it sound like me, I should have just written it in the first place. You know, as me.
So where is this long and winding road of a post going? Well, I don’t know. I’m just kind of winging it to help get that AI out of my head. This post won’t be perfectly structured. This post won’t have a singular point. This post won’t be full of catchy hooks. That is the point.
I am putting AI on the bench. I have to. I was debating just stopping altogether. What was a hobby was becoming a lot of frustration and time wasted.
Which is ironic, because the entire selling point of implementing AI was to speed things up and save time.
The joke is on us, I guess.
I have a question for you. What do you truly find valuable about using AI? What would you never want to go back to doing without AI’s help? Leave a note in the comments.
