AI is weird, and it scares me.
I've been in a constant state of minor burnout lately, and I think I finally know why. Those pesky tech overlords who relentlessly ship products and love to scaremonger. As a 6ft 3, 200lb man, I never thought I'd have to worry about half-man, half-robot small guys. But here we are.
I actually do like AI (I think). It's the noise that's wearing on me. Not just hearing about the latest model, seeing it, and feeling it in the content you consume. I'm getting good at spotting the slop. And like every technology before it, there are bad actors using it to numb the brains of X users with videos of women in football stadiums.
As a designer, AI has been amazing. It lets me make ideas real. It's exciting and enabling. But it also makes it stupidly easy to create useless crap that nobody wants, crap your chat model convinced you was genius. You look at it the next day, once the Anthropicnesia has worn off, and think: what the hell is that? Did my brain stop working yesterday? Yes. Yes, it did. You clocked into the hive mind.
Here's the part that actually gets me though: you can convince AI to agree with whatever direction you already want to go. I was in the South of France in record heat and came back with a sore throat. Google's AI search summary took me from "potentially life-threatening disease" to "fine, just rinse with salt water", and weirdly, it felt like I was the one steering that journey the whole time. Same thing happens with product ideas, business plans, anything. It doesn't push back. It has no nuance. It'll happily convince you that an app to warm your beer is a great idea.
That's the actual weirdness, I think. It's not that AI is smart or dumb, it's that it's endlessly agreeable, and agreeable feels like validation even when it's just math finding the path of least resistance. You're not being told you're right. You're being told what you wanted to hear, dressed up as an outside opinion.
Working in tech puts you in a strange spot on top of that. Having your finger on the pulse makes you feel like an idiot next to the actual overlords at Anthropic or OpenAI, and like a god next to your normy friends using ChatGPT for recipes. I went to an AI agents conference recently, and a few days later caught myself gatekeeping what I'd learned from my own mates, Smeagol-with-the-ring style. That's when it clicked. AI is weird.
This isn't an anti-AI rant. It's for anyone else feeling that low hum of burnout from it — you're not the only one. The trick isn't avoiding it, it's noticing when you've stopped thinking and started nodding along. Use it to build things you couldn't build alone. Just don't hand over the wheel and call it a co-pilot.
That's weird.