See Gillian Tett’s recent piece in the FT - “A few months ago, a New York financier told me he had just experienced a “first”: his 2025 summer interns “were the first true AI natives I have seen”. This meant they had grown up not only among digital tech, but AI too.
So how did it go? He winced. While those wannabe masters of the universe initially seemed wildly impressive, when senior financiers later probed their ideas, they found them alarmingly shallow.
Consequently this person’s company made fewer return offers and is now focusing less on graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics - and more humanities students instead.
“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” he explains. “
I am deeply troubled to hear that publishing companies are selling people’s work without consent or compensation. I’ve always been worried about my writing being scraped from the internet to train LLMs and thought there was safety in copyright. I guess it doesn’t matter when tech companies are working directly with copyright law firms and publishing companies to extract your work with minimal cost and impact to themselves. Of course they were stealing copyright material initially, but now they’ve built the legal avenue to continue without consequence.
Eventually the business leaders who invest in AI because they like the idea of laying off workers to cut costs and the government investing in it because they see it as a thing to "beat" China at will realize what they are actually investing in lmao. The people making this don't care about your business, or even their business, and they definitely don't care about silly human geopolitics. They are posthumanist eugenicists who don't believe "flawed" biological beings have any right to exist.
Benn Jordan published a video about a year ago where he describes how he can publish code along with his music that makes AI hear something completely different. He wanted to protect his published music from being exploited to make AI music. I’m not technologically savvy at all, but it made me wonder if a similar concept could be used for the written word.
"The study asked people “how often they experience serious trouble with memory, concentration, or decision-making,” all of which the CDC classifies as “cognitive disability.” Combing over 4.5+ million responses across ten years, the authors."
You know what did this? This happened long before AI. Was anyone paying attention? Literacy rates starting dropping years ago, so did IQ. Does anyone care about actual causes or just looking for a talking point about, "I hate AI, I hate human intelligence, I hate humans." I get hating OpenAI or corporations, but if you hate the catalog of human history, including your own book, that's weird.
Many people do. But if you care about brain health, then starting paying attention to what causes that damage. Tiktok was a bigger problem, 15 second video clips scramble cognition. Believing in your identity and ego, like Christianity or classis liberalism, being a capitalist will cost you even more cognitive decline that AI.
There's differences in impacts between Individualism and Collectivism users. Your culture makes all the difference in if you lose brain cells. Not the tech. Bet you have no issues with belief in the self. Or how about, use AI correctly? Since westerners use it for a crutch to their lack of critical thinking that their schools don't teach. 19% of professors can meaningfully define critical thinking. It's the society we live in that uses it wrong, that's not the technology, that's political error.
How about, take some responsibility for where and how you direct your attention or what ideas you choose to believe? Because if you don't, you'll end up with internallzed oppression. That's going to do more cognitive damage than AI, social media and light lead poisoning. If you choose to believe Individualism, then you lack the self awareness to realize you should be complaining about politics if you cared about cognitive decline.
Commercial media has always had this issue though. A person’s work sits in between commercial spots or print ads for Shell Oil or Tesla or Monsanto. You might see a quarter-page ad from some extractive megacorp nestled into the text of an article about the legacy of extractive capitalism.
Art and business have the same tension, with the worst entities in the world funding ballet and art exhibitions. Ditto nonprofits, taking crumbs from the very corporations responsible for the problems they’re working to address.
I’m not excusing this latest bit of bleh, but it’s hard to know where to draw the line, harder to actually draw it and still make a living.
See Gillian Tett’s recent piece in the FT - “A few months ago, a New York financier told me he had just experienced a “first”: his 2025 summer interns “were the first true AI natives I have seen”. This meant they had grown up not only among digital tech, but AI too.
So how did it go? He winced. While those wannabe masters of the universe initially seemed wildly impressive, when senior financiers later probed their ideas, they found them alarmingly shallow.
Consequently this person’s company made fewer return offers and is now focusing less on graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics - and more humanities students instead.
“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” he explains. “
I am deeply troubled to hear that publishing companies are selling people’s work without consent or compensation. I’ve always been worried about my writing being scraped from the internet to train LLMs and thought there was safety in copyright. I guess it doesn’t matter when tech companies are working directly with copyright law firms and publishing companies to extract your work with minimal cost and impact to themselves. Of course they were stealing copyright material initially, but now they’ve built the legal avenue to continue without consequence.
Thank you for your work!
Eventually the business leaders who invest in AI because they like the idea of laying off workers to cut costs and the government investing in it because they see it as a thing to "beat" China at will realize what they are actually investing in lmao. The people making this don't care about your business, or even their business, and they definitely don't care about silly human geopolitics. They are posthumanist eugenicists who don't believe "flawed" biological beings have any right to exist.
Benn Jordan published a video about a year ago where he describes how he can publish code along with his music that makes AI hear something completely different. He wanted to protect his published music from being exploited to make AI music. I’m not technologically savvy at all, but it made me wonder if a similar concept could be used for the written word.
https://youtu.be/xMYm2d9bmEA?is=D37ETADS1Dr2c0I_
"The study asked people “how often they experience serious trouble with memory, concentration, or decision-making,” all of which the CDC classifies as “cognitive disability.” Combing over 4.5+ million responses across ten years, the authors."
You know what did this? This happened long before AI. Was anyone paying attention? Literacy rates starting dropping years ago, so did IQ. Does anyone care about actual causes or just looking for a talking point about, "I hate AI, I hate human intelligence, I hate humans." I get hating OpenAI or corporations, but if you hate the catalog of human history, including your own book, that's weird.
Many people do. But if you care about brain health, then starting paying attention to what causes that damage. Tiktok was a bigger problem, 15 second video clips scramble cognition. Believing in your identity and ego, like Christianity or classis liberalism, being a capitalist will cost you even more cognitive decline that AI.
There's differences in impacts between Individualism and Collectivism users. Your culture makes all the difference in if you lose brain cells. Not the tech. Bet you have no issues with belief in the self. Or how about, use AI correctly? Since westerners use it for a crutch to their lack of critical thinking that their schools don't teach. 19% of professors can meaningfully define critical thinking. It's the society we live in that uses it wrong, that's not the technology, that's political error.
How about, take some responsibility for where and how you direct your attention or what ideas you choose to believe? Because if you don't, you'll end up with internallzed oppression. That's going to do more cognitive damage than AI, social media and light lead poisoning. If you choose to believe Individualism, then you lack the self awareness to realize you should be complaining about politics if you cared about cognitive decline.
Commercial media has always had this issue though. A person’s work sits in between commercial spots or print ads for Shell Oil or Tesla or Monsanto. You might see a quarter-page ad from some extractive megacorp nestled into the text of an article about the legacy of extractive capitalism.
Art and business have the same tension, with the worst entities in the world funding ballet and art exhibitions. Ditto nonprofits, taking crumbs from the very corporations responsible for the problems they’re working to address.
I’m not excusing this latest bit of bleh, but it’s hard to know where to draw the line, harder to actually draw it and still make a living.
A bit ironic to post this on Substack.