2025- You and the environment is what feeds AI

I know, I know. AI was exciting and the new shiny thing when it bowed into existence in November 2022.

But.

But have you ever wondered what AI gets out of this?

It can make you feel like an artist. It can make you feel like a writer. It can make you feel like the best singer/producer in the world. It can make you feel like the best director of a movie ever!

It can make your appointments and keep your calendar and give your reminders of things.

But it can also steal ideas and already published works. These are video, music, and writing. They call this training the AI and writers and performers and movie companies have no say.

What I want to write about today is the way that you, a regular joe or jane, feeds the AI.

The AI requires VAST amount of energy and water. Lots of water. Millions of gallons of it.

Your data is being compromised and stolen every time you interact with it.

All of it. Your identity.

Your brain (we talked about that last week).

Your ability to engage meaningfully in the world without the AI crutch.

All of this is fed into AI program and repackaged and sold back to you. At a higher cost.

There is definitely a reason for the existence of AI. To crunch the numbers and the existing data that we have on things like cancer rates, medication classes, and it can even see cancers before the human eye can.

AI is meant to serve us.

Instead, we are serving it.

Our attention.

Our time.

Our energy.

Our water.

And ourselves.

On a golden platter.

Because it is the new shiny and you can make a lady picture with 5 breasts.

This is a warning.

Also a reminder to go re-watch the Matrix. Or the Terminator series. But I like the Matrix.

AI is here and thriving.

Because we are its food.

School Me Saturday 8/16/25- AI is Making People Dumber

AI was thrust upon an unknowing public in late November 2022.

All of a sudden AI was EVERYWHERE!

In our search engines. You no longer could run a simple search without AI thrusting itself into the conversation. Uninvited or not. Frankly, it was giving Clippy vibes.

In our “art”. Yes, the quotes are important. Or should it be an asterisk? Also AI art is slop. By that I mean it is crap. Shoddily done, hallucinatory, and ubiquitous. Not to mention obvious.

In our daily planner. Some people began using AI immediately as an assistant. To keep track of their meetings, to bounce ideas off of, and to help write.

Students began using AI to cheat. They didn’t do the assignment. They asked a program, one that has known hallucinatory proclivities (they all do, no matter what people are saying), to write their assignments. And then they were just copy pasting the results into their papers.

When artists and writers objected to their works being used to “train” these large language models, the programmers started to feed the models crap. And the hallucinatory problem got even worse.

And the models started spouting the nonsense it was being fed and some people took that as truth.

I have been invited to use AI to write my thesis. No thank you. The Big Write will be by my own hands and out of my own brain. No large language models needed here.

AI output is only as good as the material that is used to create it. And so much of that is terrible. I would hazard a guess that it is all terrible.

Ooh, you can give a pretend sex doll a third breast. Why not go whole hog and give the bytes four breasts. Or is that too bestiality coded for you?

There is even a name for the phenomenon of the human brain on AI. The phenomenon is split into what the researchers explain are the three main problems.

There is the cognitive offloading. This is when you ask AI to do so many tasks for you, you forget how to do them for yourself. Instead of engaging in the multiple decisions that everyday tasks demand of us, you cede this power over to the machine
There is skill erosion. Simply put this the decreased ability to do the skills that you rely on the program to do for you. Alexa started this cascade. In this the ability to critically evaluate information and come to conclusions is missing.
There are generational gaps. Much like introducing the computer in the 1980s, and the cell phone in the 1990s, and the smart phone in the 2010s, earlier generations who are not born into the AI generation don’t depend on it as much. I have seen this in the subsequent nursing generations. And it is scary how they depend on their AI assisted searches.

All of this results in a population and a generation who is unable to reason, unable to perform simple tasks, and can’t evaluate the results they do get for clarity and for correctness (truth) of the information given.

The best day of the last 6 months was when I found out how to disable the AI search. I taught Chrome how to disengage from AI searching. And I think my searches are better and more complete this way.

This information is from a study as reported by the Forbes Magazine.

School Me Saturday 7/5/25- students and AI part 2

AI is the newest, shiniest tech toy.

Of course companies are falling over themselves to make it available to us, the consumers.

At a premium of course.

But what are the other associated costs?

According to a report from IBM’s Institute for Business Value, the cost to compute (what it costs the company to make AI possible) was expected to climb 89% between 2023 and 2025.

And guess what? They won’t be interested in footing the bill forever. Nothing is free.

Ever.

So they made it ubiquitous. To make us as consumers dependent on AI. So that when costs to the consumer are introduced we will be convinced we can’t live without it.

Goodness knows, students are already dependent on it.

Especially the younger ones.

I know I am not dependent on it. I find output obnoxious and not a plaything. AI isn’t anything that I am curious about. I wanted to find a workaround with search engines so it would NOT give me AI output. I found one. I put -AI in the search bar and about 70% of the time I do not get an AI output. I have also heard putting a curse word in the search string will allow for AI free output, but that is not my experience.

Hell, Google itself is a kind of AI. That is how we get answers so quickly to a search field. But also less than AI because it didn’t suck up all the world’s literature and art to make a large language model.

In last Saturday’s post I wrote about the my personal experiences with AI since ChatGPT was released in 2022. But it goes farther back than that. Much, much further.

In the 1988-1989 school year, I was an eighth grader. There was no cafeteria at our school. Most schools in California don’t have cafeterias. Students gather on the quad, sit on the grass, lean against the trees, roam the campus, or walked home for lunch. Personally that did not interest me, none of the options were appealing. I usually went to the campus library and read. One day, my computer teacher approached me and my friend Aluminum to run simulations in the computer lab during lunch. We jumped at the chance.

After that, I split my time between the library and the computer lab.

In the library I read.

In the computer lab, Aluminum and I were working a machine learning task that the teacher had asked us to do. Basically we played a version of Connect Four with the computer. As I remember, the goal was to see if the computer could be trained to beat us.

I imagine that there were students in computer labs just like us across the country, training the computers to “think”. This was the way that people originally termed artificial intelligence, thinking.

It wasn’t until 1997 that Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in chess. But I think the seeds of this computing marvel was in the computer labs at middle schools and high schools in the 1980s. From my first experience with machine learning to this chess match was less than 10 years.

Look how far artificial intelligence has come in just over forty years. It started with nerd students in the classrooms playing with the computer, teaching it to think.

Oh, boy. Hold onto your hats.