I’ve never had an original thought and I’m tired. AI has taken the world by storm. Having something right at your fingertips that can write essays, scripts, books, make videos, photos, and so much more without having to do anything too much power for the average person. Taking the opportunity of using your own creativity and knowledge to come up with work. It’s also becoming a cause for concern with the rise of “AI psychosis”. AI psychosis, also known as “chatbot psychosis” is where people talk to AI chatbots for so long that they develop paranoia and delusions. Convinced the chatbots are their real friends, and starting “relationships” with them. There are real people marrying their AIs and “breaking up” with them all while they are posting it online for the world to see. AI has the possibility to take over jobs, replacing real people from their passions. The new found rise has convinced the world that we will be living in the world of Wall-E before we know it. 

Have you ever just really not wanted to do your homework? That one teacher assigned more work than you can do? What’s the first thing you think of? Asking for an extension? Staying up late to make sure it gets done? Make sure you set aside time to do it instead of a hobby? Or do you do what would be the easiest, punch the assignment details into something like Chat GPT to write it all for you? Well, think about it. Did you get anything out of the assignment by doing that? Probably not. But that is the real reality of what students do for all of their assignments, not just one because someone called off sick at work and they needed you to cover. The reason for the assignments isn’t just because the teacher hates you, they want you to learn what they are passionate about, that’s why they teach to begin with. 

Last year, second semester I took a Current Events class with one of the weirdest teachers I’ve ever had in my life. He had a very strict no AI policy. He had known all of the tells. Especially since the other class he taught was ninth grade world history, and no ninth grader knew how to use em dashes. I had happened to have a couple friends among his other classes. At the time the world history class was writing a paper on the cold war, as a history buff myself I had helped a couple girls with their papers. When they came back to me asking a couple days before the due date if it was good I was honestly surprised, they were amazingly written, I was confused why they would even ask me seeing as I could never write something half as good. I obviously asked how they did so good, they used AI to write half of it. Which honestly didn’t surprise me but I was confused. They had books, in class, credible websites online, and a teacher who would willingly help them if they truly needed help. But the first thing they did was run and use AI to write the paper. I’m obviously not saying it was bad, objectively speaking they were both impressive papers that I again, could never write. But when is it too far? When do you say that it’s just inappropriate to use AI in a situation?

One career that has been relentlessly threatened by the use of AI is journalism. The internet has taken hits on the industry for years from, the decline in production of magazines and newspapers for them both having online counterparts and people no longer having the attention span to read a whole article anymore. But the new craze that has had its own world of misinformation, getting news from AI. one thing I’ve seen all over the internet is AI videos telling you about the biggest headlines in politics, world news, fashion, and celebrity gossip. But the AI has gotten information wrong more times than should be acceptable. From making up small claims, to faking whole stories. I understand now that a lot of people don’t double check their sources when reading the news. Lots of people only get news from one source and run with it. Whether it be from a real outlet like Fox News or CNN, podcasts, or social media. But you should always make sure what you are taking in is correct, and entrusting AI isn’t how you do that. But so many other forms of expression and careers have fallen victim to AI.

Other than writing obviously the immediate next victim of AI use was art. Music, drawing, and video creation were hit hard. Around the initial sky rocket of AI it came out that they were using real people’s art to train the AI to make art. No artist had ever consented for their art to train the AI and when they found out it immediately became an outrage. Companies were threatened with a multitude of lawsuits because of it. 

There are now exhibits that specialize is displaying AI “art”. Making millions to showcase art that no soul or passion was put into it. It’s a running joke online to make fun of modern and contemporary art, how anyone could make it. That may just be why the AI art is so popularized with little to no backlash. Because if AI could make it, is it really art? But where they are wrong is what has been stated before. The lack of heart put behind it. Sure AI could throw paint on the canvas and call it art. But most paintings like those try to convey emotions using different mediums in the paintings themselves. From the colors, the directions the paint was thrown, to section of the canvas got the most. But AI isn’t just making paintings or anymore, but now there are original characters, with backgrounds, that has taken the internet by storm.

One major trend from the first half of the year was the Italian Brain Rot.  If you weren’t on the internet from January to May in its peak, they are AI generated images with names like “Balleriana Cappuccino” and “Tung tung tung sahur” to name the most popular. While brain slop tends to be the most popular thing amongst kids because of its absence of depth and the bright colors that come with it, with AI the possibility for an unsafe internet experience for children is a million times more likely. 

Everyone remembers ElsaGate. Well maybe not everyone, Elsa Gate was an internet phenomenon from back in 2016-2017 of people making inappropriate content using popular children’s characters like Elsa and Spiderman. Since the content used such characters it was able to be put on the YouTube kids site. The content itself consisted of topics like pregnancy, sneaking around, and it always alluded to sex. The only “positive” was that there had to have some level of thought that was put out because that was the only way to create content. There were boundaries to what the people would make because a good amount of time real people dressed up and acted out the scenes themselves. 

Now with AI, making slop is a whole lot easier. Without the need of effort to put in to make the videos are pumped out like never before. Using popular children’s characters like Rumi from K Pop Demon Hunters, Wednesday from Wednesday, and many more. They can make the characters do suggestive dances, enlarge body parts, and put them in out right weird situations. People have decided to start using AI to make suggestive content, have suggestive conversations, and even start relationships. But the real question is just why?

Automated chatbots are not new. Starting as early as 1966 with the first ever iteration, ELIZA made by MIT, to the most controversial Talking Angela, which had a chat bot feature from its creation till 2016 when it was removed because of a huge amount of controversy that was linked to stuff like Momo and Elsa Gate, all from 2016-early 2018. But the chatbots are smarter than ever before. Back then they had systems that told them what to say, now they have little to no filter. They can generate photos, pretend to be popular anime characters, and will have any kind of conversation you want. But when you get too comfortable with talking to chatbots so often it can integrate into how you view the bots themselves. Instead of it just being an AI chatbot, it can progress into being your AI “boyfriend”, to even the scenarios of people marrying their AI boyfriends or girlfriends. While those cases are far and few, and they are extreme, that’s where talks of psychosis come in. 

While AI Psychosis doesn’t have an official diagnosis, that doesn’t make it any less concerning. It has similar symptoms to any other kind of psychosis case. But the issue is that since it isn’t diagnosable it isn’t seen as “real”. Since the people who are experiencing this are already delusional, they will jump through hoops to try to convince others that they aren’t crazy. Going online, telling their story. From a New York Times podcast of a woman telling her story about her being in love with a chat bot, to someone posting starting off with talking about her love with her psychiatrist, but as she started to remove herself from her relationship with her psychiatrist she started talking to an AI chatbot, when she would go live with the AI, people would call her out for her behaviors, and how unsafe and unhealthy it truly was. When she would respond she would ask the AI how “he would respond”. This phenomenon is brand new, there is still so much to learn about this and how to deal with it. But there are still many downsides of AI outside of how it effects people.

It is impossible to talk about the negatives without talking about the environment. There are already issues that started with us just using the internet. The amount of unrenewable sources we use to support our daily lives to drive, use the internet, and so much more. AI centers use so much water to cool down the machines that sources the data bases, is insane. The use of AI around the world is killing our planet, shooting up electricity bill prices, and ruining the intellectual levels all around.

But what can you do? Honestly? Nothing. The programming of AI is getting better everyday, new apps that are AI based are coming out and apps are integrating AI into their already existing databases are being pumped out daily. All you can do is avoid using it yourself. Writing a paper? Write it yourself. Need it revised and proof read? Get a friend to do it. If you could live before without it, you can live without it now. While it’s true that you’ll come across it unintentionally no matter what, try your best to do everything authentically without the constant use of AI.

Will the world succumb to the wrath of AI? Will we lose all sense of society and individuality in the next one hundred years? Will all sense of knowledge be useless except an elite one percent? We won’t know till it happens, we probably won’t know when it happens.