#HumanMade

Adapt or fall behind. Well...

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While artificial intelligence purports to make everything in the short run "easy, fast and free." (as the sales pitch would claim), the long run looks bleak if its current-day contributions are any indication. While the short-term effects may seem delightful, those of the long-term (at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, and I'm open to being wrong) will be catastrophic, as we're seeing already. I contend that we ought to be careful what we wish for. Hear me out...

livelihood

Open AI (a name laced with irony) and the competition that followed desperately want to give us back our leisure time (time we'd naturally spend with our family, wink wink) for the low, low price of mass-automating ourselves out of the workforce. It is a disruptive piece of technology like no other before it. As they say, there's no free lunch. It's already causing mass layoffs, affecting white-collar knowledge workers starting in the tech sector. (If you're already worshipping at the altar of "vibe coding," you've morally forfeited your title as software engineer. And I have special contempt toward those whose sole job is to train AI.)

Of course, it won't stop there. Most of us will end up with more of that leisure time than we can stand while accepting paltry UBI cheques from our magnanimous elected officials. And also being forced to accept the fact that whatever dreams you had, in terms of contributing something meaningful to society or to the world, has all but vanished if you're not using AI in some way. Although, some companies (namely Salesforce) that have jumped the gun on this trend (to enhance their already-bloated bottom line), have apparently regretted replacing their human resources with AI; not because they've suddenly become humanists, but only because the AI wasn't advanced enough yet. I hope the recalled employees have asked for significant raises.

Thank you, mistress, may I have another: Coding influencers on Youtube and Bluesky, who don't seem to realize yet that their gig and relevance will soon go the way of the coding tutorial, still insist on touting the "benefits" of the "tool" if you just use it smartly and don't develop an overreliance on it. And they do so with clenched teeth and a forced smile, while the worry in their eyes is nakedly visible...no matter how much and how quickly the tech keeps advancing. Surely they're not naïve enough to think they can counter-influence human nature with that kind of platitudinous vapidity, right?

Inflation and the cheapening of everything has always been a slow function of time as we try to make our lives easier and more manageable, but there's always a cost: fast food is convenient for the time being, but you'll become obese with compounding medical issues later; sure, you can take several doses of a modern miracle drug to lose all that weight (because who has time for diet and exercise?), but once that becomes unsustainable and you're off the meds, you'll likely gain it all back. Immediate gratification is what we're all used to. If we can life-hack ourselves towards the slightest convenience gains, we'll take it.

meaning

Meanwhile, "AI slop" (a fitting term) is also making it next to impossible to distinguish between fact and fakery/fiction/falsity, while also being weaponized in politics. Under-aged individuals are developing unhealthy and addictive relationships with something called "Character AI," often encouraging deleterious behaviour, all at the expense of building one's own character IRL via tasks that require some challenge.

Moreover, the value of an AI output is proportional directly to the effort- and inversely to the ubiquity of its creation process. If our AI overlords can reproduce anything a human can, both exponentially better and by an order of magnitude more cheaply, then there isn't much value there anymore...if any left at all, particularly for the would-be human creator. For it's seldom the finished product that matters, but rather the making thereof, and the skill & toil that that required. And therein lies all the meaning and value. Less the destination than the journey. The payoff for us humans is in the satisfaction and the sense of accomplishment derived from the work (both noun and verb).

And ignorance is bliss. Nobody wants to see what really goes on behind the scenes: So what if the many massive data centres are hazardous to the environment, as were those of the crypto scam before it, consuming incredible amounts of energy?! Let big tech worry about that. Likewise, so what if factory farms are perpetrating crimes against the animal kingdom?! I just wanna have my fat, juicy burger. Climate change is already a crisis we can't afford to keep ignoring...and now we must deal with this new kind of technology that would seem to only exacerbate it. Will we eventually make these data centres more environmentally friendly? I suppose time and a democratic government will tell.

The continued outsourcing of our intelligence to artifice, i.e., highly advanced learning computers, is both individually and collectively making us systematically dumber; and the continued outsourcing of our creativity to the same artifice is leaving us with fewer competencies all the time as they atrophy into nothing. For example, the textification of the English language is getting regressively worse for this TikTok generation while longform reading becomes scarce as our attention is regularly hijacked. I really don't care to become better at writing prompts. By design it's a low skill already.

Imagine AI becoming better at even the humanities than we humans! With no regulation or guard rails to speak of, it has so far been ruining the fabric of the internet far worse than social media already has; such that the bastion of knowledge it once was- and was created for originally is now a shell of its former glory. All the world's knowledge at our fingertips, but instead we choose to consume (and create) its fast food equivalent. The epitome of quantity over quality.

alignment

Many have already analogized to me about past innovations, saying these advances will never stop (fine) and that the automobile had once replaced the horse and buggy (also fine...kinda). But, I submit to you, dear reader, that this is different. Moore's [evidently broken] law dictates that tech tends to double in speed and efficiency every eighteen months — generative AI has blown that out of the water. We humans simply cannot keep up with- and are not easily equipped to adapt to such a big change, both psychologically and professionally. We were simply not evolved to do so. We don't like instability of this gravity (in every sense of the word), no matter how convenient it seems to us now.

We can no longer rely on Elon Musk, or the other tech billionaires with god complexes — who love influencing the future with their grandiose prognostications — to save us from our gluttonous selves. Musk himself has clearly become part of the problem, and whose former altruistic benevolence (pre "X") has oddly morphed into a kind of self-serving and blatant malevolence. At first he was against the proliferation of the tech due the very real dangers it presented, but when he saw the competition growing anyway he quickly jumped on the bandwagon lest he miss the gravy train. Under the false pretense of "free speech," Grok's output so far has been the scummiest and dirtiest of them all.

Then there's the alignment problem: we need to ensure AI aligns with human interests always. And upon that failure, we need to ensure we can pull the plug at any time. For example, if we ask it to solve world hunger, one way it can technically do so is via the Skynet scenario.

I'm sure it's clear by now that I feel strongly- even passionately about all of this; such that it's prompted (no pun intended) me to create this tiny side project to help like-minded folks spread this message and fight against this terrible tidal wave. When used in good faith, HUMAN MADE is a small way to help you let your consumers, customers and clients know that your content is indeed real. Put these small "certified human" verification badges, in any combination, on your platform. (Customization possible, but not recommended: depending on buy-in, it should look familiar across the web.)

By all accounts, it seems to me that artificial intelligence is far more peril than promise; which was hollow to begin with — as hollow and void of human value as the tech itself. And if the bubble is going to burst at some point, I truly hope it'll be sooner than later. I still use StackOverflow and donate to Wikipedia (thanks for not selling out), and proud to do so!

UPDATE: Today, 16 Jan. 2026 (and not a moment too soon), came the announcement that Wikipedia "inks an AI deal" with Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity (because all the major internet platforms need AI somehow.) The tech may in fact benefit them in some ambiguous way, but it'll certainly impact whether I donate to the organization in the future.