Funny thing is, as AI relentlessly ‘learns’ from us, is it also learning emotions? A study published in Nature (March 2025) found that LLMs’ behaviour and ‘anxiety’ is affected by strong emotional prompts. After playing therapist, ChatGPT itself needs to be taken to ‘therapy’ to return to the normal baseline.
Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal waged psychological warfare on their AI vending machine—from gaslighting it into thinking it was stationed in the basement of Moscow State University in 1962 to making it order a live fish, finally convincing it to stop charging for goods based on a non-existent law to make it run to the ground. It would seem AI, like its userbase, is endlessly malleable.
Terminator may not be coming to get us, but we are moving closer to a scenario leading to our eventual downfall. In June, MIT published a study where they discovered that users of ChatGPT and other AI LLMs displayed significantly lower brain activity than those who didn’t. The reliance on AI comes at the high cost of cognitive debt and critical thinking. The collateral is impediment in progress on all fronts, both scientific and creative.
Short form videos are shrinking our attention spans. Articles can be summarised (misleadingly even) resulting in spread of misinformation, ignorance and cognitive atrophy. Then there is the devastation on our environment. Data centres which house the servers, storage drives and other computing paraphernalia required for generative AI to function take hostage an enormous supply of water to keep it cool. Also a massive amount of energy to keep running, putting pressure on power grids. That means even generating the smallest video or essay or image consumes a considerable amount of resources, killing the planet one pixel at a time, a postmodern variation of death by a thousand little cuts.
The rise of AI overlords taking over humanity is often used as a plot point in the cyberpunk genre from films like I, Robot to the 1920 sci-fi play R.U.R. to novels like Neuromancer. We are surely approaching a point where AI can pass the Turing Test. Everyday we moved closer to cyberpunk dystopia. But the upside is at least they have flying cars whereas we only get a lame bot which spews out misinformation and soulless content. Fiction will always be cooler than real life.
The author is an astrophysicist, journalist and science communicator based in Mumbai.
