ai poisoning: are we using ai, or is ai using us?

we live in a strange time. for the first time in history, an average person can sit in front of a computer, type a few sentences, and suddenly feel like they can do absolutely anything. build an app?

easy.

create a business?

sure.

write a book? why not. make music, design a website, create a game, solve some complicated problem that normally takes years of experience? just ask ai. and that’s where the problem starts. i like to call this ai poisoning. not the technical kind where someone feeds bad data to an ai model. i’m talking about something happening to us, the people using it. a slow change in how we think, how we spend our time, and how we see our own abilities. and the worst part? most people don’t even realize it’s happening. the illusion of god-like powers before ai, if you wanted to build something, you actually had to learn how to do it. you needed knowledge, experience, patience, and most importantly, time. now you can describe an idea to ai and watch it come to life in front of your eyes. it’s impressive. i’m not denying that. but there’s a big difference between being able to create something and actually understanding what you’re creating. the problem is that ai makes those two things feel almost identical. suddenly, everyone is a programmer, designer, writer, entrepreneur, scientist, or whatever they want to be that day. you start believing that the only thing separating you from creating the next billion-dollar company is a good enough prompt. and because creating things has become so easy, you start creating everything. things you need. things you don’t need. things nobody needs.

another app. another website. another project.

another idea that sounds amazing for about fifteen minutes. you spend hours talking to ai, improving prompts, fixing things, adding features, starting new projects, and convincing yourself you’re being incredibly productive. but are you? just because you’re creating something doesn’t mean you’re actually achieving something. you might be building ten projects a week and still be getting absolutely nowhere. and while you’re enjoying this feeling of unlimited power, something much more valuable is disappearing.

your time.

think about facebook, instagram, and the entire social media era. people thought they were getting amazing services for free. you could communicate with anyone, share pictures, follow friends, and spend hours being entertained without paying anything. except it was never really free. you were paying with your attention, personal information, habits, interests, and behavior. social media companies learned everything they could about you and used that information to keep you scrolling and sell advertising. your attention became the product. and now we’re entering another era. except this time, the deal is even stranger. we’re paying ai companies actual money to use their products, while also giving them our time, ideas, knowledge, and sometimes even our private information. think about that for a second. we pay monthly subscriptions, spend hours interacting with these systems, explain our problems, correct their mistakes, show them how we work, and share things that took us years to learn. depending on the service and its privacy settings, some of those conversations may even be used to improve future ai systems. and even when they aren’t, we’re still spending enormous amounts of time inside someone else’s product. we are not just consuming technology anymore. we’re helping shape the technology that could eventually compete with us. we’re teaching machines how humans think this is probably the most interesting and disturbing part of the whole thing. think about what happens when you use ai. you ask it something. it gives you an answer. the answer isn’t good enough, so you explain why. you provide more context, correct its assumptions, share your experience, and tell it what you would do differently. sometimes you spend hours explaining a problem that took you years to understand. now imagine millions of people doing that every single day. programmers explaining code. lawyers explaining cases. designers explaining decisions. writers improving text. business owners sharing strategies. an enormous amount of human knowledge flowing into ai products. of course, this doesn’t mean every conversation instantly makes the underlying model smarter. that’s not how these systems work. but the bigger picture remains. we are building our lives around systems designed to imitate more and more of what humans do. and we’re often giving away knowledge without thinking about what it’s worth. the irony is that people are spending their most valuable resource, their time, helping a technology that may eventually reduce the value of their own skills. and they’re enjoying every minute of it. when ai starts thinking for you there’s another problem that i think is even bigger. people are slowly losing the habit of thinking for themselves. not because they’ve suddenly become stupid. but because thinking is difficult, and asking ai is easy. need an idea?

ask ai.

need to make a decision?

ask ai.

need to write a message?

ask ai.

need to understand something?

ask ai.

need to solve a personal problem?

ask ai.

eventually, you stop asking yourself questions before asking the machine. and that’s a dangerous habit. because your brain, just like your muscles, needs exercise. if you stop solving problems, stop questioning things, stop researching, and stop making your own decisions, what happens to your ability to do those things? we’ve already seen something similar with social media. people stopped paying attention for long periods because everything became short, fast, and designed to give immediate satisfaction. now ai is offering us something even more addictive. instant answers, instant ideas, and the feeling of instant intelligence. why struggle with a problem for three hours when ai can give you an answer in three seconds? sounds great, right? but what if those three hours of struggling were exactly what made you smarter? what if the most valuable part of solving a problem was never the solution itself, but what you learned along the way? we’re so obsessed with saving time that we might be removing the very experiences that make us capable human beings. but is ai actually creative? this is another thing that bothers me. people talk about ai like it’s some kind of genius with unlimited imagination. ask it for a business idea and it gives you ten. ask it to invent something and it gives you a detailed explanation of something that sounds completely new. but where does all of that come from? ai learns patterns from an enormous amount of existing human knowledge. books, articles, code, images, conversations, research, and countless other things humans have already created. it can combine ideas in surprising ways, and sometimes those combinations can actually be useful or new. but that doesn’t automatically mean it understands creativity the way humans do. it doesn’t have your childhood, your experiences, your failures, your ambitions, or the personal reasons that make you want to create something. and yet, we’re increasingly allowing it to decide what we should create. instead of having an idea and using ai to help make it real, we’re asking ai to give us the idea in the first place. and then we’re asking it how to build it. and then how to sell it. and then what to do next. at what point does your project stop being your project? if ai gives you the idea, makes the decisions, builds the product, and tells you what to do next, what exactly is your role? copying and pasting? the productivity trap here’s something i think a lot of people need to hear. being busy is not the same as being productive. and ai has made it incredibly easy to stay busy. you can spend an entire weekend building something that would normally take a team of developers several weeks. that feels amazing. but what happens on monday? does anyone need it? does anyone want to pay for it? did it solve a real problem? or did you just spend your entire weekend entertaining yourself with a very expensive toy? there’s nothing wrong with experimenting or having fun. learning and building things just because you enjoy them is perfectly fine. the problem starts when you confuse entertainment with progress. when every new idea feels like an opportunity. when every unfinished project gets replaced by another one. when you’re constantly building but never actually getting anywhere. ai makes creating things almost frictionless. but that friction used to serve a purpose. before spending six months building something, you probably thought carefully about whether it was worth doing. now you can start six different projects before lunch. and because starting is so easy, finishing becomes less important.

the result?