"The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent

[highplainsdem]

back cognitive support systems. Forever.

It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain."

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever.

It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

— tante (@tante.cc) 2026-03-12T21:08:48.584Z

Tante is followed on Bluesky by Gary Marcus, Gil Duran, Garrett Graff and Brian Merchant, among people I also follow.


Link to a Gizmodo article about Sam Altman making that statement:

Sam Altman Says Intelligence Will Be a Utility, and He’s Just the Man to Collect the Bills
https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-intelligence-will-be-a-utility-and-hes-just-the-man-to-collect-the-bills-2000732953


Some of the replies to Tante's post on Bluesky:

They saw that the web can be a global network of information and knowledge at nominal cost 24/7 because distribution is incredibly cheap, and they absolutely hated it.
They can't create anything of value, so they curate what other people make, drown everything else and charge for their "service".

In all the Idiocracy discourse, we focused too much on how ridiculous it was that society would become so stupid so quickly, and we never stopped to think that an entire trillion-dollar industry would arise and build their business model around *making* society that stupid, that quickly.

It isn't just de-skilling. They're foisting this on kids and destroying their critical thinking ability before it even has a chance to fully form.

They steal other peoples data, ideas, writing, art, personal images and voices, etc. etc. basically everything on the internet and then some and then they turn around and want us to pay them for it on a meter.

"Look we just want to rule over uneducated serfs as a godking forevercaste, is that so wrong?"

[highplainsdem]

1. Some more Bluesky comments on Tante's post, these taken from the Quotes section:

‪
I've been banging this drum at my university. No one seems to care. The party line is that AI is wonderful, and it is my job to figure out how to get my students to use this amazing new thing. No concern that we might be keeping them from being self-sufficient thinkers for the rest of their lives.

OH "It's like if Uber hit you with a car and broke your legs so badly that you had to spend the rest of your life taking and paying for Ubers."

That's the entirety of it too. Look at the studies of AI coming out of MIT; that shit rots your brain

This week my management (we're lawyers, don't hate us) put out a policy that no one should use AI in their writing and if they did it would be considered misconduct and I was SOOOO HAPPY! They didn't rule out future use, so ehhh, but they did emphasize how unreliable it is now. I'll take the win.

As a note, doing things like reading, doing puzzles, learning a new language etc. slow cognitive decline.
I wonder what the Alzheimer's numbers are gonna look like in a few decades.

Build an entire society of brainless sheeple who will have no choice but to pay them

Sounds a lot like pay us to use your brain with information that may or may not be all wrong

This is why I'm not touching this shit with a 49 and a half foot pole. The way the industry is operating currently is so clearly trying to create a user base that's completely dependent on their product, then pull the rug out from under them and charge them up the ass.
AI: the first hit's free.

"We see a future where [fundamentally and quintessentially human trait] is a utility ... and people buy it from us" is so wonderfully amoral and dystopian. I couldn't distill a more blatantly horrifying evil sentence if I tried.

[dalton99a]

2. "You want to know your name? Pay me."

[dickthegrouch]

3. Pay you????

Without a Universal Basic Income, how do you suggest we do that???????