Why you need to reconsider your relationship with AI
Students globally spot the presence of AI every day, but it’s become so commonplace that we’ve stopped caring about it. Maybe a friend needs more help than usual on their homework, or maybe a teacher has stopped making their own assignments, and they turned to AI for a quick fix.
AI has taken something important from so many people that you know; it has robbed them of their ability to reason. This epidemic has caused a lot of anger among members of our community and beyond, and we have the right to be angry, as so many of our friends have become less present and operate with less thought.
A study carried out in April 2024 by Ismail Dergaa and her team has already found serious mental consequences from frequent use of AI-chatbots like ChatGPT, GROK, and Claude. AI has only been super relevant for around five years; in contrast, tobacco has been used by people since 5,000 BCE and was only found to be unhealthy in the early 1950’s.
We have discovered the problems with AI over 1,000 times faster than we had with tobacco, which should tell us something about just how serious a threat it poses to us. If your memory and reasoning decline in this way, you cannot learn, and you will just believe what anybody tells you.
An AI-induced lack of reasoning has already been taken advantage of numerous times by various politicians within recent history. During the New York mayoral race in 2025, for example, Andrew Cuomo used three distinct and different AI-generated posts to promote his campaign, which was intended to fool his audience into believing things that were not true about the kind of person he is.
Another senior citizen who has been dipping his toes in new technology is our president, Donald Trump. Donald Trump has been using his platform on both Freedom Social and X (formerly Twitter) to spread his hateful rhetoric, and recently, he has been doing this through AI-generated videos of people such as Barack Obama, No Kings protesters, and anybody he doesn’t like.
Artificial Intelligence is only a weapon used to hurt us; it is advertised with words like “intelligence,” “mind,” and “smart,” but do not be fooled. OpenAI has fed over half of all internet traffic ever into their language and image models; this data is fed into a statistical algorithm, and then the most likely words for each request are sent back out towards the user.
No thinking is involved in this process; it is still just a computer program, a computer program that steals your data off the internet. This technology is always packaged with stars and other fantastical-looking icons in order to uphold the illusion of magic and mystery. AI companies don’t want you to know how their chatbots work because then we would realize that we don’t need them.
I, too, used to use generative AI back around 2022. I was introduced to it because my father was on the cutting edge of things at the time. I used to be fascinated by DALL-E and ChatGPT. In fact, I would sometimes use them just to generate funny images. Why did I change? I didn’t flip my mindset by myself, I met friends over summer who told me more about the downsides to this technology, and after doing my own research, I felt ashamed; there was no reason for me to use this so frequently, everything I used it for I could have done myself. So why do people find utility in it? Convenience.
The most common uses for generative AI today are for schoolwork and emails, and it makes a lot of sense; that is what the tech was built for. Taking these shortcuts is so tempting because of all the saved time it creates. A strong email could take upwards of an hour to compose, while AI could complete it in five short minutes; the same applies to homework. You can use AI to plan vacations, to brainstorm, and to write your papers. I get why people use it, I get why I used it, but we are becoming extensions of AI rather than it becoming an extension of us. If we are dumb and useless while AI knows everything, why are we even here?
Ideally, everybody would choose to search on the internet when they have a question, followed by typing “-ai” which eliminates the AI summary that has begun popping up after every web search. It’s the same place the chatbots get their info from, and if you cut out the middleman, you will be able to make your own judgment calls on the legitimacy of the information.
AI is a serious problem, with a seriously easy solution, so if you know a friend who has ChatGPT pinned to the quick access bar on their phone or as a saved tab on their computer, you’re not in the wrong if you tell them to get a grip. It would be for the best if nobody ever used these services again.
