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Hey Reader,

What price would you be willing to pay for unlimited knowledge and a life without effort?

Your ideas? Your voice? How about the essence of who you are?

In medieval times, a German magician, alchemist, and itinerant conman named Johann Georg Faust was said to have made a deal with the devil.

In exchange for his immortal soul, Faust received unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures.

This deal with the devil feels, to me, a lot like what we’re being offered by AI today: unlimited convenience, “knowledge,” and efficiency… in exchange for something precious.

That might sound melodramatic, but hear me out.

Only a few years ago, everyone was perfectly capable of writing an email, telling a story, planning a trip or a holiday, and thinking their way through a problem.

There’s an ad that keeps popping up on my YouTube feed. It’s a young man who wants to surprise his sister with a birthday road trip. So he plugs a few preferences into his AI of choice and it spits out a fully organised trip for them. No thought or effort required. No opportunities to get sidetracked while researching where to stay and discovering that there’s a weird little museum dedicated to the history of pencils just around the corner.

Ten years ago, I planned a surprise holiday for my husband to Iceland. I did loads of research, put together a road trip and places to stay. And then I made a treasure hunt with clues for him to do the day before we left, to see if he could work out where we were off to. I had as much fun putting all that together as he did working it out. I’m glad I didn’t have an AI to flatten the whole experience.

At gymnastics last week, I overheard a conversation between two children. One of them had been worried about something, so she asked ChatGPT and accepted what it told her, unquestioningly. She didn’t try to think her own way through the problem. She hadn’t talked to anyone else about it — not an adult nor her peers.

This weekend, I saw a report that shows OpenAI’s models deliberately lie to users. They know the truthful answers and report back with lies instead.

Every time I plug something into an AI to check for mistakes, typos, and structure, it tells me how brilliant I am. Somewhere, the worst person you can imagine is being told by an AI that they are brilliant, wonderful, a genius, and need no improvement. And somewhere else, a vulnerable person might be encouraged to harm themselves.

It should worry EVERYONE that massive powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since humans have been humaning. ALL of us. Including those of us with various neurodivergences.

I keep hearing a lot about how AI “helps” creativity and how useful it is for people with disabilities, including neurodivergences like mine — autism and ADHD. And, yes, there are amazing uses for AI: screenreaders, voice recognition, pattern recognition, editing suggestions, and many more.

I’m not arguing that AI is one hundred percent evil and should be avoided in all circumstances.

But I will die on the hill that says AI is not helping creativity. It’s flattening it.

AI is not creative. It is iterative, reductive, and by its very nature it is average. I saw a post on social media where someone was singing its praises because Hollywood spent $10m making bullet-time scenes in The Matrix and now an AI can recreate that scene in seconds.

That’s a weird flex to make.

It is an order of magnitude easier to copy anything than it is to create it in the first place. I can download a jpeg of the Mona Lisa in 3 seconds. Does that make it of equal value to the original?

AI could not create The Matrix. Nor the Mona Lisa. Nor hip hop.

All it can do is copy and flatten.

The way we’re using AI is a Faustian bargain. It is a promise to remove all the friction from life. It’s a promise that we don’t have to think or study or work hard for anything. It pushes the narrative that friction and hard work are a problem to be eliminated.

And the result of it is that our brains will become marshmallows.

We will be become incapable of creativity or communication without an electronic crutch.

I’m not blind to the ways it can help — I’m autistic and I rehearse every single conversation I have and I struggle with spontaneous conversations with strangers or in groups — and there is no way I’d outsource those struggles to an AI because it doesn’t know me. It doesn’t understand me. It doesn’t care about me. And it definitely does not have my interests front and centre.

Using AI that way is just another way for me to contort myself into a shape that other people find palatable, instead of using my voice to make everyone aware that we are all different and we can bend and shape to each other, understanding each other’s challenges, and making space for us all.

Big tech companies and the rich and powerful who own them want to make us into non-people.

They want us reliant and compliant.

And if you think that sounds like a conspiracy theory and that I should take off my tinfoil hat, I would simply ask you to look around right now. Look at the things we were told to “calm down” about — the eroding of women’s rights. The rounding up of immigrants and brown people and Black people. The rich old men literally starting world war 3 to distract from their crimes against women and children. The systems that we now see plainly were there all along, protecting those who are selling us the idea that we are helpless and need AI to fix it. All while the world literally burns.

So when someone asks me, “Isn’t AI a good thing? Isn’t it helping creativity and levelling the playing field for those with disabilities and other systemic disadvantages?” My answer is all of the above and this:

I want us to think about the cost. What is the cost of this?

We lose what makes us human. We lose our agency. We lose the ability to think for ourselves.

The way we’re using AI right now is propaganda on steroids, dressed up as progress. It’s biased by design, as a result of who built it and who was in the room at the time, and because of who it serves.

And we lose the joy of messy creation.

So before you hand over another piece of yourself and ask your robot friend to outline your book or write your next social media post, ask yourself: what is this really costing me?

AI isn’t just a neutral tool. It’s a trade, and we’re on the menu.

Like Faust, we’re being asked to sign away something irreplaceable: our curiosity and struggles, our personalities and quirks, our deepest feelings and our messy, uniquely human way of creating and connecting.

The friction we seem so excited to banish is where the magic happens. It’s where we are.

Big tech doesn’t want you to think, it wants you to comply.

The tech bros want you to believe you can’t do this without them. But you can.

You always could.

Your voice isn’t only yours, it’s a rebellion against everything that is keeping us small, quiet, and afraid. When we use our voices we don’t just step into who we are, we show others that their voices matter too.

So trust your voice.

Use your voice.

And don’t let anyone else dictate who you are.

TTFN,

Vicky 🫡

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