It doesn’t “feel that the best option is…” It doesn’t feel.
AI is a cheap parlor trick. You provide words, and it provides words back that are most likely to occur alongside the words you provided.
…
A useful reminder for the next time you’re tempted to personify or humanise an LLM.
LLMs are statistical tools. There are some things that the statistics of language can be good at, especially on average: stuff like summarisation, sentiment analysis, pattern identification, and checking for internal consistency.
But they’re just maths. They’re not a person.
It’s not even that they don’t care about you or don’t want to help you. They don’t even go that far: they’re incapable of “caring” or “wanting” in the first place. What they do is take all of the information they’ve ingested, plus their training and prompt, plus the conversation you’d had with them so far, plus a random number, and produce output which is, after a fashion, a prediction of what comes next.
As always: that’s not to say it’s useless. (It’s also not to say it’s always useful.) But as a tool, it’s pretty opaque to most normal people.
Unless you’ve really taken a deep-dive into understanding low LLMs work, they must seem like magic (hell; speaking as somebody who has taken such a deep-dive, they sometimes seem like magic!). I’m sure that some of the time, they must seem like they’re a living thing, or at least an approximation of one.
But they’re not. And it’s important to remember that.
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The evidence on AI’s effect on those who use it has been coming in, and it’s not good. While it doesn’t effect everyone, it seems to effect most people, and the worst affected, it seems, are the young. Olds have the advantage of growing up in world where they had to learn how to do things themselves. To be sure, phones and social media seem to have had a negative effect on attention span and learning ability, but AI is yet another assault, and it hits the young hardest.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
The fundamental strategy of a lot of tech startups has been to degrade pre-existing infrastructure by under-pricing, for years if necessary, until the old methods are so diminished that they can start charging monopoly pricing. Uber is the classic example: Ubers were far cheaper than taxis for about a decade. Now they’re often more expensive, if the taxis exist at all. Certainly where I live in Toronto, the Taxis did somewhat survive, and cost less.
But overall the strategy was a success, taxi companies were devastated and Uber’s doing great now. All it took was years of losses and predatory pricing: their model wasn’t superior, their product wasn’t superior except having a good app, but they had far more access to patient money, willing to take losses for years to get to the oligopoly pricing end-state.
Neither Anthropic nor Open AI are remotely profitable. Every single query costs more to run than is charged, even to paying clients. A recent increase in prices, still far below running costs, has hit users with massive bills. There’s no evidence AI is better than humans at most tasks, and the real cost (and sometimes, even subsidized, the current subsidized price) is higher than just having employees. AI is often faster, but it makes mistakes humans don’t, and needs to be checked.
But if you make your employees use it they’re going to be degraded and lose the ability to do their jobs well. The more you do something, the more your body and brain optimize for it. The less you do it, the worse you get.
AI’s strategy for replacing workers is threefold: first, sell executives on getting rid of pesky workers for AI, because it’s supposedly easier to manage.
Second: Subsidize while companies lay off the workers and replace them with AI. Once the workers are gone, jack up prices; and,
Third: by encouraging companies to force workers to use AI and to replace workers with AI in some cases, make the workers less capable: stupider. Over time as more and more people become dependent on AI to think and work for them, they will lose the ability to do the work themselves. AI may be shitty, but it will be better than the dullards AI makes its users into.
It’s an ingenious strategy, really. Make people stupid, and replace them with a product which costs more and is inferior to them for most tasks before they were made stupid.
The longer term issue will be that AI isn’t creative: it uses the embodied creativity of past humans, in terms of their writing and their discoveries to simulate intelligence. But as humans produce less and less new creative work, AI will be reduced to eating its own results, and indications are that leads to model collapse: AI’s are dependent on human, and by making humans redundant and stupid they will themselves become stupider and less effective over time.
We live in a time where we can’t look ahead, ever, at technology and make even the smallest effort to control the end results, it seem. At least in the West. Or, rather, we refuse to deal with obvious negative issues if doing so means a few people won’t be able to get as filthy rich.
Dumb.
And soon we’ll be even dumber.
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A great many, and perhaps the majority of Americans now between their late twenties and early sixties, have spent time in Mister Rogers’ neighborhood. My own period of regular visitation would have been in the nineteen-eighties, a decade when Fred Rogers introduced his preschool-age viewers to guest stars from Lou Ferrigno, in and out of Incredible Hulk makeup, to a ten-year-old boy with spina bifida. He also took on geopolitical issues, up to and including mutually assured nuclear destruction, and social ones, as on the memorable “divorce week” of 1981. Such topical broadcasts were mixed in with re-runs produced as far back as 1969, the year Mister Rogers got the country’s attention by inviting Officer Clemmons to share his wading pool.
What those of us then tuning in didn’t see was anything from the first, black-and-white season of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which comprised an astonishing 130 episodes that aired in 1968 alone. You can watch the series premiere at the top of the post, just recently uploaded onto the show’s new official channel.
It may come as a shock to see a 39-year-old Mister Rogers, whom most of us remember as the embodiment of avuncularity or even grandfatherliness. But what’s even more striking, if unsurprising, is that his onscreen persona, with its disinclination to talk down to children, never really changed. That surely owes to its apparent identity with his offscreen persona: as he liked to put it, “kids can spot a phony a mile away.”
“Aside from clips and compilations,” writes the New York Times’ Sopan Deb, “the channel will make a selection of full-length episodes available globally for the first time as well as some that haven’t aired in several decades on PBS stations.” With the show’s 60th anniversary coming up the year after next, the time does seem right to make as many of its 895 episodes as possible available to a new generation. As of now, the channel also offers the episodes with Officer Clemmons and the pool, Koko the Gorilla, and the mesmerizing look inside the crayon factory. There’s even the crossover between Mister Rogers and Bill Nye the Science Guy from 1997, by which time the latter had become a television icon to us millennials. Though we probably didn’t catch his visit at the time, we can now keep it bookmarked to show our own kids — assuming they don’t discover it first.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
My Students Can’t Read. “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.”
Lately I’ve been strengthening my professional network by shitposting on LinkedIn. Keep scrolling to unlock my FREE course on how you can too!
My LinkedInfluencer journey began when I was reflecting on the evil fake polycule that I tricked 3 million people into believing in. I was baffled that so many people believed it was real, and my theories on why already sounded LinkedInesque, so I figured I’d post them on LinkedIn.
Also, my friend Mackenzie has been regularly posting on LinkedIn after starting a job in B2B SaaS, and she enthused its untapped potential. I thought it’d be funny to follow her LinkedInfluencer arc but post meaningless garbage instead, which is just like most posts on LinkedIn, but a little bit funnier.1
My LinkedIn post performed unexpectedly decently. And almost immediately, a swarm of other LinkedIn satirical posters requested to connect, I suppose I inadvertently blasted out the shitposting batsignal.
At this point, not only did I receive no negative reinforcement, I actually got positive reinforcement, so I wanted to see how far I could take that, and posted about my charity strip show.
I should mention that I actually used to work at LinkedIn, which probably made this saga even more exciting for all my former coworkers on the platform.
Then the spirit of professionalism possessed me; I began blacking out and letting the soul of a middle aged salesman take hold.
The above post was reshared by LinkedIn Lunatics (a Twitter account dedicated to sharing cringy LinkedIn posts), but so many commenters thought it was a genuine, unironic post, which was insane. I mean, look at it.
yes, it is bullshit. or as the kids call it, parody.
And since I was resharing my LinkedIn shitposts on Substack, a bunch of Substackers started connecting with me on LinkedIn, which was so funny. It’s like when you see your friend dressed up in a little business suit for a formal event, but you just see them as a silly little guy, and the dichotomy is hilarious. I’ve seen your worksona, I know what you really are…. a PROFESSIONAL!
This one came to me in a dream.
While my LinkedIn posts did not reach the viral heights of the “I am humbled and honored to share” announcements on LinkedIn, they did get outsized attention when I reshared them on Substack. Why? Perhaps, the rebellion against society’s idolization of professional life. Perhaps the voyeurism, the little portal through which to peer at another platform, a far darker and more evil place, while remaining safely behind the white-picket suburban, Substackian fence, clutching one’s pearls in horror while one can’t help but look on in grotesque curiosity.
Funny enough, accomplished business professionals, the caliber of which I would want to network with anyway, reached out to ME because of my stupid shitposting. As well as like 50 randos that just wanted to strengthen their professional network or whatever.
Why did you do this?
Because it’s funny.
Also, I’ve recently started taking this approach in life, where whenever I’m scared of doing something, I just do it immediately. I’m a chronic over analyzer, and I waste so much energy stressing about crossing the line.
But if I don’t know where that line is, I will forever needlessly constrain myself. So I have to find it at least once. And in my search to find it, I’ve lost conviction that it even exists. Or at least, it lies far beyond the bounds of what I even want to do.
As I grow older, I’ve also become increasingly dispassionate about optimizing my life around any career or institution.
There’s this parable of the Mexican fisherman and the American investment banker. Basically, the fisherman says he just fishes enough to support his family’s immediate needs, then spends the rest of his day with his family and friends, drinking wine, and sleeping in late. The banker scoffs and says he should spend more time fishing, to afford a bigger boat, then get more boats, then open his own cannery, etc, and become a millionaire. The fisherman asks, what then? And the banker says then, the fisherman can retire, and describes the life of leisure the fisherman is already living.
So imagine instead of fishing, the hero of this story was really passionate about posting stupid shit on the internet.
I don’t want to wait until I’m retired to live my ideal life, I want to live it constantly. Why would I postpone that to when I’m too old and tired to even fully enjoy it? Like, I digital nomaded around for a bit, and already felt the difference of how hard travel is on the body between my early 20’s and late 20’s. Plus, when I’m old I might become out of touch and less funny, the true horror.
Besides, to be honest, we are all tiny cogs in a huge machine and I don’t think other people care much about what you’re doing. Sure, you’ll hear some horror story of someone posting something and getting fired, but also, people go for a walk outside and get hit by a car. It doesn’t mean it’s probable, and the severity of the consequence multiplied by the chance it happens isn’t great enough that you shouldn’t live your life.
I eventually told people at my “big prestigious tech job” about the time I summoned hundreds of people to the park for Sit Club (my parody run club), or my fake steakhouse that went internationally viral, and the worst thing that happened was they asked me to bring more of that creative zest to team events.
“But Danielle, you don’t understand! My job is so big and serious and important, this doesn’t apply at all!” Sure, there’s granularities to it. Don’t start an onlyfans or become a weapons influencer if you want to be taken seriously in a professional career. But I think people overly sterilize themselves for companies that don’t even care enough to read cover letters and would lay you off on a whim because they overspent on Claude credits that month.2
Maybe shitposting on LinkedIn isn’t your first priority after embracing your newfound knowledge that you do, in fact, have free will. But I urge you to toe the line of something, tap your foot against it and see if it even exists at all.3
I took this approach in other areas of my life too - texting friends I’d fallen out of touch with when they came to mind, without overthinking it; shipping projects and only being a bit obsessive about the details; posting things without worrying about every possible person’s reaction to it. Opportunities and good luck only come from putting yourself out there.
Log in
The evidence on AI’s effect on those who use it has been coming in, and it’s not good. While it doesn’t effect everyone, it seems to effect most people, and the worst affected, it seems, are the young. Olds have the advantage of growing up in world where they had to learn how to do things themselves. To be sure, phones and social media seem to have had a negative effect on attention span and learning ability, but AI is yet another assault, and it hits the young hardest.
