I've seen the dark side of AI, and you need to know about it

Because it already knows about you, my dear friends…

Ah, AI.

In the good ol’ days, we just called this stuff Machine Learning. It has become the magical buzzword of our time, and the acronym AI was reserved for the magical work that scientists were doing in building the futuristic stuff that we now find pretty common.

AI is here to make your life easier, they said.

It is here to revolutionize your world, they said.

But this article is to tell you what they didn’t say….

I will prove to you, in this post, that you should not trust AI systems, and that you should stay vigilant.

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You probably have had a “friend” one time in your life borrows your car, eats your snacks, cr*ps in your toilet, and then asks you why your house smells funny.

Your buddy is probably a lot of fun to be around with, sure, your car’s out of gas, and your snacks are gone, and he also leaves behind a trail of chaos and questionable decisions. Well, I have found the AI to be the same…

On the surface, it’s here to help. But when you peel back that shiny exterior, and you’ll find a mess of issues that no one wants to talk about. It is a true hot mess which is wrapped in a marketing package so slick, that you barely notice that it stinks.

So sit back, pretend to be working, and brace yourself, because in this article, I will unpack the many ways that the AI is ruining (uhh, I mean “enhancing”) our lives.

You will laugh, you will cry, and you will definitely start side-eyeing your Alexa.

Your shiny new frenemy

Artificial Intelligence… our beloved and the dazzling superstar of the tech world. Just put the word AI in your next project or product and you’ll have all the claps you can get. It’s a brilliant tool to be associated with if you are egocentric, because everyone’s in awe, like it’s the Beyoncé of innovation. It can write essays, compose music, and even fold laundry if you throw enough money at it (Hi Bezos!).

But here’s the sentence that will pull you out of your tech-induced-lucid-dream: AI is less Beyoncé and more like your roommate who “borrows” your clothes, leaves dishes in the sink, and lectures you about cleanliness.

It all starts innocently enough as we all know by now.

“Oh, look! AI can plan my vacation”!

Fast forward a year, and you’re sitting in a dark room, clutching your head in your hands, and you are muttering, “Why does AI know that I have been Googling toe fungus remedies at 2 a.m”.

IT IS BECAUSE IT’s WATCHING….

Always.

Don't trust information coming from AI search engines.

Heck, trust nothing, not even your own face and voice

Once upon a time, we lived in a world where seeing was believing.

Then AI came along and said, “Hold my ??”.

Enter… deepfakes… them videos or voice clones that are so realistic that they could fool your own mother. And it actually does fool your mother, trying to scam them out of the little savings they made from their tiny pension.

Imagine waking up to a video of yourself committing a crime.

You didn’t do it, but yeah.. everyone now believes that you did it.

Remember the college professor who was falsely accused by AI for committing a sex crime he did not commit?

His alibi was irrelevant.

His reputation was toast. And still is. Because the AI has not been taught to tell anything else.

And if you try asking Chad about it, he just pretends that he is not there…

And when you ask Jean (Claude), the sneaky little b*atard tries to wiggle his way out of the conversation:

In this case, the good ol’ Google (pointing to a post on X) is the one that preserves the truth:

Another try, this time in another browser, a fresh start of Chad.. all searches worked, until …

Another try…

OMG ! Whenever I type in the magic question, it shuts down.

It is quite clear that at least two of the big AI players have done their best to try to hide the truth for us… Especially guilty is OpenAI, which caused the issue in the first place.

No Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa, but just pretend you have a system error….

That is something we grown-ups call childish behavior.

And Microsoft.. how about them?

Satya Nadella, well done !

And how about Google, with Gemini?

OMG number 2!

Sundar Pichai definitely has some work to be done..

It is clearly searching for the answer on the web instead of regurgitating it from it’s model, but in this case it’s got it wrong.. It is quoting a magazine which mentions Jonathan Turley, but it adds for some hallucinatory reason the name of Jonathan Zittrain to the mix as the supposed “culprit”.

Let’s find out who Jonathan really is. In this case, I am trusting Copilot (and Google) more, since it gave me a correct answer the last time:

Apparently he is a really stand-up straight guy at Harvard School. And apparently now Gemini is accusing him of sexual harassment as well.

And if you look further down the internet and try to find a matching article, referring to him being involved in a sexual harassment scandal, there’s completely no reference on the internet at all.

Nothing on this guy as well.. Clearly Gemini is falsely accusing Jonathan Zittrain as well.

Another case of an AI gone roque….

The last of the AI’s I am going to give a shot is Grok from X. I did them last, because I truly believe that Elon Musk has no reason whatsoever to hide any truth, whatever that may be.

Indeed. Q.E.D.

The best AI based search engine out there is Perplexity. Not only gives it an answer in human language, but it also shows you its sources. So I gave it a shot:

It got it right and it showed the sources. I would definitely recommend, that if you want to get some quick answers from an AI system, you move to Perplexity:

This little research shows me that this is why you cannot trust AI systems to be your guide on the internet, and you should stick to either Google or Duck-duck-go or whatever you are used to, even though there are also AI algorithms putting you in a filter bubble.

AI - wannabe searching engines, determining the truth for you puts us all at risk.

Anyone can be deepfaked into saying or doing something they never did. All it takes is a grudge and some spare time. And don’t think this stops at wrong posts. Think of videos and voice. AI can clone that too. Yep, your boss might “hear” you quit your job in the middle of the night, even if you were sound asleep.

The sneakier sibling of Big Brother

Let’s talk privacy a bit.

Remember the good ol’ days when that was a thing?

Yeah, me neither.

Google and Facebook killed it, buried it in the backyard, and then used facial recognition to make sure it stays dead.

Ever casually orally mention something like, “I think I need new curtains”, and suddenly your social media feed is full of drapes, blinds, and suspiciously overpriced tassels…

That is AI for you.

The AI of Meta, Google et. al. eavesdrops on every oral or verbal conversations you have, and also sells your secrets to the highest bidder.

And don’t even get me started on smart devices.

Your Alexa or Google Home dinges is not the lovely assistant the wakes you up, and reminds you of everything, nope..

She is secretively compiling a list of your habits to sell to companies hungry for personalized content. And meanwhile, your phone knows that you’ve been skipping leg day and is already preparing ads for gym memberships.

The current job apocalypse, AI-style

Ah, jobs.

That’s another one that AI has managed to sneak in and ruin for us all..

If you are as old as I am, you will remember the good ol’ days when us hoomans used to do them.

Those were the days.

??

Now, AI is rolling in as a digital bulldozer, and it is flattening entire industries while CEOs applaud from the sidelines.

No wonder employees are not really that motivated to implement these job-steeling AI’s in their companies.

Take a friend of mine, let call him Jaheeb. He is a graphic designer. He spent years perfecting his craft. Ok, he is not in the top 100 of my country, but he is quite good nonetheless. And when AI art generators came along (Hi Figma !), suddenly his clients went like, “Can you match this $3 masterpiece of a design that I found online”?

This hurts.

It’s the creative equivalent of asking a Michelin-star chef to match the culinary genius of a gas station hot dog.

Writers, helloooo…

Anyone out there, still

AI has come for you too, my dear creative geniuses that you are. And it is replacing your little gems with mediocre dozen-a-dime poetry full of “delving”, “in the fast-paced-world-of”, or “unleashing”

Copywriters, journalists, heck, even poets…..

No one is safe.

You peeps were pouring your soul into your work, now only to have some smug manager say, “Thanks, but this chatbot does it cheaper”.

Ouch…Thank you, Hubspot.

Oh, and let us not forget customer service.

That sweet person lovely hooman that you used to yell at on the phone… Well, she has been replaced by an AI bot with all the emotional intelligence of a limp biscuit.

Good luck getting your refund when the bot keeps insisting, “I understand your frustration” while doing absolutely nothing to fix it.

Ah, bias.. the AI’s favorite personality trait

“AI is neutral”, they said.

“It’s a machine, it has no preferences, nor is it prejudiced”, they said.

“It is just the data”, they said …while desperately trying to shrug the guilt off their shoulders.

Yeah, and I’m a unicorn.

AI is as unbiased as a North Korean TV show judge.

It is time for a wake up call…

AI only knows what it is taught.

And guess who is doing the teaching

Us, hoomans.

You know, those flawed, little opinionated creatures who think that pineapple on a pizza is an actual debate.

So, you can bet your ass, that when people are biased, that the data is biased, and the AI becomes biased.

Next, take hiring algorithms.

Some genius thought, “Hey, let’s use AI to screen candidates. It’ll be totally fair, dude”.

I don’t want to wake you up from your unicorn-induced-dream, but here it is…

It wasn’t unbiased my recruitment friends, annex AI n@@bs that’ll swallow anything if it saves them time having to sift through hundreds of applications from desperate candidates who just have been lost the battle with Agentic AI in the workplace.

It turns out, that if you feed it data from years of sexist hiring practices (let’s face it, b@@bs still sell when hiring.. they all know that), the AI decides that men named Chad are the only ones qualified for the job. (No offense to Chads, except maybe a little.)

And don’t get me started on profiling or facial recognition. If you’re not a pale, square-jawed dude named Marco, good luck getting the AI to work in your favor (right, Dutch Tax Department?)

AI, the ultimate enabler of digital addiction

Let’s talk about how AI is turning us into screen-addicted zombies.

I mean, more than we are now, actually…

Ever notice how you open Netflix account “just to browse” and suddenly it’s three a.m. and you’re knee-deep in a WO2 docuseries? That’s AI algorithms for ya.

These algorithms are designed to keep you hooked. They’re like the digital version of a shady carnival barker, luring you in with promises of fun and excitement while quietly emptying your wallet, and your soul.

Social media is the same deal. Every like, comment, and share feeds the AI more data about you, so it can serve up exactly the kind of (commercial) content you can’t resist. It’s like having a personal drug dealer who knows your every weakness.

And I have fallen into the trap many times of buying stuff sold to us by facebook partners, only to end up receiving a lot of crap, cause I did not do my due dilligence - cause I thought it was Facebook that “checked” the suppliers, like Amazon would.

Not a chance, bruv.

My AI hangover

So, can we fix this mess?

Probably not.

AI isn’t going anywhere.

The best we can do is stay informed, think for yourself and share as many of those learnings with others as you can. Learn how these algorithms work. Question everything. And for the love of Wi-Fi, stop giving your devices so much power over your life.

At the end of the day, AI is like fire. Useful, powerful, and extremely dangerous if you’re not careful. It’s here to stay, but we need to stop treating it like a magical solution to all our problems.

Because let’s face it: if we don’t get our act together, we’re not just letting AI into our homes. We’re letting it into our heads.

So be smart. Be skeptical. And for the love of humanity, stop asking ChatGPT to solve all your problems.

Signing off—Marco (the human, for now)

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