Look, I get it. I’m fighting a losing battle. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been the hot topic for the last few years, and President Trump’s recent announcement of a $500 billion “Stargate” investment by Oracle, OpenAI, Softbank, and a UAE technology investment firm, MGX, has only served to turbocharge those conversations. And on the heels of that announcement, we learned the Chinese have an AI engine called DeepSeek, a revelation that caused convulsions in the stock market.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay, nothing I can do about it, nothing I write or say will halt its progress. But count me among those with reservations. Sure, it has some very intriguing and possibly positive aspects. Using advanced technologies to plumb the depths of knowledge and existing research, to quickly make connections that would take humans hours or days or centuries to uncover? Great! To rapidly prove theories and commercialize products? I’m down with that. Fantastic! Heck, I’m even ok with the use of AI to aid creators, akin to using word processing programs to aid writers.

A line is crossed when AI is used to generate content, and to that end, I think AI is a dreadful development. I pride myself on my writing, I often labor over it, trying to get it just right. Even the inconsequential fluff I post on social media and my websites. I do this writing first and foremost for an audience of one. Me. If others like it, great, but I write for a simple reason: I am a writing preferenced learner. I experience, I observe, I think…then I write, and when I write, I uncover more ideas, make more connections, and further increase my learning.

AI, for all it’s incredible power, will always lack the two fundamental inputs – primary experience and unhinged creativity – that I utilize daily to not only have some fun, but to learn, to grow, and to further develop and hone my skills, my awareness, and my person. Cogito, ergo sum.

When we no longer think, we no longer are. I am sad when I think about kids today and their “modern” ability to press a button and have an AI bot spit out a term paper. They might have the end result of learning, but they won’t have the process of learning, and therefore, they won’t learn how to think and build and create and put together connections from disparate sources. They will be guided by the perceived perfections of the machine, captive to their inert laziness, and subjugated by their limited attention spans.

Just look at how confused some people get when driving by way of GPS. They no longer look at street names or numbers, they blindly follow what the computer tells them. Recently, we used an app to order food, the delivery driver didn’t bother to look at streets or numbers, and instead blindly followed her phone to an unhoused part of the street…one block over from our house. The address the human inputted was correct, the destination the GPS provided was inaccurate, and the result? Human lost! Human confused!

Even ringing a simple doorbell has flummoxed technology reliant people. They sit in their cars, stare at their phones, and can’t figure out what to do if the person in the house doesn’t immediately answer a call.

AI is bound to make confused phenomena more common, and worse, more pronounced.

When I decided to jot down some thoughts, none of what you just read was in my mind. But as I wrote, I thought, I wondered, and I created, and for those who become captive to AI, those very human traits I love so much, will wither and die.

I am not opposed to technological innovations. My ability to write, and therefore think, has been greatly aided by the computer and word processing programs. But those technologies freed my mind, and have been invaluable in my ability to explain, communicate, and create. Those technologies have not done the work for me. I remain the originator, the decider, the director. I remain the creator.

If AI is used to augment, but not replace human creativity and invention, fine. If AI is used to expedite, but not replace human thinking and problem solving, fantastic. We should not cede the role of creator to technology. AI should be a tool for the creator, and not the creator itself.

The challenges we face with AI are very human in nature. AI will be misused by belligerents, its content blindly believed by idiots, and the human ability to lean replaced with an avaricious desire to have the result without effort. That old saw, “it’s on the Internet, it must be true,” will no longer be facetious humor, but instead ridiculous dogma.

The impetus for what has turned into a Gildas-esque* screed was a brief diversion into the perils of social media. As I took a moment to scroll through my Facebook feed, I found an AI “generated” picture of an animal, with its lefthand fingers on the fretboard, holding a guitar, then immediately below it, an entirely unrelated page posted a picture of guitarist Steve Howe, sitting in almost exactly the same position, with his lefthand fingers on the fretboard, holding a guitar at a similar angle. Coincidence? Or taproot of fraud? That’s for you to decide.

AI is not intelligence. It is a very complicated program that uses stunning amounts of engineering to…plagiarize what already exists. AI simply “scrapes” the information humans create, then upon human command, regurgitates it, and perhaps, on human command, adulterates it. It is not intelligence; AI is fancy plagiarism.

Fortunately, AI is not sentient. Yet.  This article mainly highlights fraudulent nature of AI, blind reliance on its output, and worse, the loss of learning that accompanies it. In my next article, I provide a deeper exploration of these issues, as well as the ramifications of technology that becomes self-aware.

* Gildas was a 6^th century British monk, famous for his screed decrying the loss of Briton to invading Saxons.