It has been 2 years since ChatGPT launched. What has it done to us?

It's been two whole freakin' years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene and upended our lives. Since November 2022, OpenAI’s lovebaby has grown from a chatbot to a full blown societal obsession.

Yippee! ??

Can you believe it?

This fancy AI dinges has wormed its way into every nook and cranny of our tiny and futile existence, It started life as our next best word predictor and quickly moved up the ranks to start drafting our emails and churning out "creative" content.

Oh, the joy of having a digital assistant that is as original… as a boy band (read: (Lobotomized AI* | LinkedIn)

And get this - by February 2024, nearly a quarter of U.S. adults had hopped on the ChatGPT bandwagon. And those pesky youngsters (aged 18-29) just could not resist the temptation to leave their homework to a bot, and with an amazing 43% of them, they embraced their new AI lord of darkness. ChatGPT's global user base exploded like a overripe watermelon, and gained over 200 million weekly users by August 2024. If the Brain (Pinky) wanted to have a plan for world domination that actually worked, this is it!

But let's not forget about the other players in this large language model catwalk. We now also have got Claude, Llama, Gemini, and Perplexity, and they are all craving for a piece of the AI pie. And each one's got their own little party tricks, and they are carving out their niches in various industry. It is truly a cutthroat competition and it has kicked innovation into high gear.

Yay for progress!

Right?

And the digital divide is wider than the Grand Canyon.

As of October 2024, around 5.52 billion people, or 67.5% of the global population, were internet users.

That leaves nearly 2.6 billion poor saps without internet access, effectively locked out of the ChatGPT fan club. The rise of LLMs shows us that there is a glaring need for inclusive infrastructure to bridge this digital chasm. But hey, who cares about equality when we've got shiny new toys to play with?

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Two years in the making

So, we are two years into ChatGPT’s reign of terror - oops, I mean innovation. Since November

It drafts emails, writes mediocre poetry, and apparently knows the answer to every question you were too lazy to Google yourself. And what it doesn’t know, it just makes it up. How convenient. It even made you an unknowing liar.

But what has this AI revolution really taught us? Not just about technology, but about?ourselves?

The TL;DR: It’s not flattering.

ChatGPT is less a helpful assistant and more a funhouse mirror, and it is reflecting all our cognitive quirks, biases, and our sheer laziness (let’s be honest, folks). So strap in/on - whatever you prefer - because it is time to dissect six brutal truths that AI has shoved in our …..faces over the past 24 months.

1. It turned us into lazy thinkers

We are so darn lazy that we'll gobble up whatever ChatGPT spits out, no questions asked. It’s right there in front of us, so it must be true! Never mind the fact that AI is only as unbiased as the data it's been fed, which is often riddled with hidden biases, and that it makes stuff up half the time.

But hey, why bother with pesky things like verification (and reputation) when we can just sit back and let the machines do the thinking for us? Lazy bastards = us.

And not only are we lazy, but we’re also overconfident.

AI is not magic, but we treat it like it’s some all-knowing oracle.

Just because it sounds professional doesn’t mean that-it-is right. Yet, we swallow its output whole, and we never stop to question if it’s fact or fiction. It’s like trusting my dachshund to do my taxes just because it looks so serious when sitting on the keyboard.

And there are those folks who actively defend this laziness. They claim “it saves time.”

Sure, it saves time, until you are called out for presenting nonsense at work because you trusted a chatbot to do your job.

Tip from a pro: do your own damn thinking.

2. It has complicated simplicity

The lure of present bias has us chasing instant gratification like a dog after a squirrel. Sure, there are pressing ethical concerns like umm…. misinformation? (hello ChatGPT, Gemini - thank you for calling Jonathan T and Z a perv), data privacy, and deliberate manipulation, but those are tomorrow's problems, right-o? Companies are too busy using ChatGPT to replace customer service reps with broken bots or boost productivity to worry about trifling matters like job displacement or the erosion of human judgment.

Ethics, schmethics!

This short-sightedness is just irresponsible, and friggin dangerous. Companies are essentially building houses on quicksand. What happens when the “efficiency gains” from AI turn into mass layoffs, public backlash, or ummm lawsuits? Oh right, they’ll cross that bridge when it’s on fire.

And not forget the general public’s complicity in this mess. We are so dazzled by shiny new tech that we don’t demand accountability - and yes, I carry a huge part of that guilt as well.

We will scream about TikTok privacy policies but say nothing about the algorithms quietly dismantling our job markets.

Hypocrisy much?

3. It dragged us out of our comfort zone

Oh, and let’s stand still for a moment and think about something called the status quo bias, which has some folks clinging to the familiar like a toddler to their blankie. ChatGPT has proven that it can make us more efficient and creative, but some educators are still resisting AI integration like it’s “the Borg”, and they fear it'll undermine traditional teaching methods. On the other hand, some are going in headfirst, letting AI call the shots on tasks that require human insight.

Dumb. Outright stupid.

Finding the sweet spot between natural intelligence and artificial intelligence? Pfft, ain’t nobody got time for that!

But here’s the thing: AI is coming to replace us—or at least replace the parts of us that refuse to adapt.

Hahahahahaha... still clinging to that fairy tale about collaboration? Cute.

Clinging to the past isn’t noble, it is delusional.

Refusing to explore AI’s potential does not protect tradition. Nope, it just drags everyone else down. Newsflash: you can either evolve or get left in the dust, because cautious and innovative isn’t a choice, it is a survival strategy.

Then there’s the overreliance crowd. The ones who think that AI is a magic wand that will solve all their problems. Blindly outsourcing human judgment to machines is reckless.

Balance, people.

Look it up on Wikipe….

Oh, that won’t be around for much longer, sorry.

4. We are spending our days testing new AI

Decision fatigue, is the bane of our existence in this AI-powered world. With the abundance of AI tools, our brains are more fried than a county fair corncob. We are drowning in a sea of AI options, and each one demands time and cognitive effort to master. It's enough to make you yearn for the days of carrier pigeons and smoke signals.

Here’s some irony for ya: AI is supposed to simplify our lives, but instead, it’s overwhelming us with complexity. Every new feature, every shiny update, just adds to the cognitive load. We’ve gone from “work smarter, not harder” to “spend all day figuring out how to work smarter”.

And let’s be real, most of us don’t even use half of these tools properly. Instead of simplifying workflows, we’re creating tech stacks so convoluted they need flowcharts to understand.

Less is more, people.

Streamline or sink.

5. It has turned fiction into facts

Here’s a bonus epiphany for you: we trust AI way too much.

ChatGPT et. al. isn’t infallible, but we treat it like a prodigy intern who never screws up. Well think again…it screws up….a lot.

It hallucinates, fabricates, and sometimes spits out garbage with a straight poker face. And yet, we let it call the shots in critical decisions.

Genius move, right?

And now we are moving this hallucinatory lobotomized picasso into the hearts of our organizations. I hope my next paycheck will come in when we have moved to Agentic AI.

6. AI has become our ultimate ego booster

And finally, let’s talk about narcissism. Save the best for last…

AI has become less of a tool and more of a validation machine.

We want it to solve problems AND we want it to tell us that we’re brilliant for asking the questions. It’s like the evil queen from Cinderella, who is staring into a digital mirror that says, “Yes, you’re amazing, babe. Keep going”.

But when AI doesn’t give us the answer that we year for…we tweak the prompts, over and over, until it says what we want to hear. Instead of challenging our own thinking, we use AI to reinforce them.

That is narcissism at its finest.

Signing off - Marco

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