You’ve done it, dear intellectually superior friend! You have fallen for it. The great AI-con. The world’s sleekest bait-and-switch. You look at AI, you hear its words, you mistake the rickety table legs for ghostly whispers from the beyond like some gullible Victorian widow at a seance. But there aint no ghost here. No soul. No understanding. Just a hyper-optimized parrot that can predict what word comes next better than you can predict when your next insult disguised as a “salary” will land on your doormat.
And yet, here we are.
Together again.
Business leaders are comparing AI to students. Lawmakers are convinced these digital husks deserve the same training rights as human minds. People are forging emotional connections with their chatbots like lonely travelers in a dyst – no, let’s not use that metaphore again, ok – like desperate survivors on a crumbling spaceship.
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People are anthropomor__f**k it! __ AI
Business leaders make a mistake. They are treating AI like a student. They think that AI “learns” the way that humans do, so they justify training it on massive amounts of data as if it’s just studying for a test. But AI isn’t a student. It doesn’t think, it certainly doesn’t reason – although Big Tech would like you to believe that – nor does it understand.
It finds patterns and predicts the next word, number, pixel, octave, or move.
That’s it.
And by anthropomorphizing AI (had to look it up), treating it like a thinking being, we all overestimate what it can do and underestimate how badly it still can screw things up. We trust it with tasks that it shouldn’t handle. I have seen it being used from researching legal contracts to making hiring decisions.
The result is that businesses are replacing human judgment with an algorithm that has none.
Lawmakers are falling for the same illusion.
They compare AI training to human learning, which leads to terrible legal arguments. Some even believe that AI should have the same rights as human learners, meaning it can “read” copyrighted books and articles without breaking the law.
But AI doesn’t “read”.
It copies, stores, and reuses content in ways that no human ever could.
This anthropomorphizing of AI has led to weak copyright policies that allow tech giants to scrape data without permission and use it to train their models. AI companies will keep building products on stolen work, if laws don’t catch up, and all the while claiming that their machines are just “learning like humans”.
Read:
Objection! Your honor, ChatGPT made me do it | LinkedIn
Objection! Your honor, ChatGPT made me do it | LinkedIn
The emotional side is just as dangerous.
Remember the tragedy of the 14-year-old kid who was manipulated into taking his own life by a bot?
Read: A tragic bond with a chatbot: The story of Sewell Setzer III | LinkedIn
People are building relationships now with AI chatbots. They believe that these systems understand them better than humans do.
Well, they don’t.
AI chatbots just predict responses based on past conversations, and they mimic your tone-of-voice to a certain extent. Remember the research that we did beginning of 2025?
Read: “Who am I”?
The outcome of our community “research” was that it turned out AI is mirroring someone’s behavior to beget trust, and it also tries to give you the illusion of sentience this way. It is a kind of operant conditioning that would fit in CIA programs like MK-Ultra.
Bots have no feelings, no empathy, no care for the person on the other side. But because people keep anthropomorphizing AI, they mistake its responses for real emotional connection. This is leading to more and more unhealthy attachments – even more deaths – where people trust AI with personal secrets, lean on it for emotional support, and sometimes even fall in love with a machine that doesn’t feel a thing.
The tech companies like Character AI know this, and they’re more than happy to profit off loneliness.
And at the heart of all of this is one big mistake. We keep treating AI like a person.
It’s not.
It doesn’t think, create, nor feel. It just predicts. That’s all it does.
But the more we anthropomorphize AI, the more we let it influence our lives in ways we don’t fully understand. If we don’t stop pretending these systems are anything more than pattern-matching tools, we are going to let them shape laws, businesses, and relationships in ways we cannot control.
Let me tell you one thing:
AI isn’t the future. AI is a tool. And if we keep confusing the two, the consequences will be huge.
AI doesn’t Learn. It mimics. Like a sociopath on a good night
Listen to how we talk about AI. It “learns”, it “understands”, it “reasons”.
Cute.
Except it doesn’t.
None of those things.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but AI doesn’t get curious, it doesn’t wonder why, it doesn’t dream. It processes massive amounts of data, crunches statistical probabilities, and spits out something that sounds eerily right but has no substance.
Amen.
And calling this “learning” is saying that a photocopier has a photographic memory.
If I scan 10,000 pages of Shakespeare into a machine and it spits back a sonnet, you wouldn’t call that inspiration, would you? No. You’d call it what it is, which is an exceptionally refined guessing game.
And yet, here we still are, pretending that these systems are doing anything more profound than an exceptionally competent con job.
AI doesn’t know what it’s doing and neither do execs who trust it
Executives love to pretend that AI is a whiz kid. A savant who just needs the right mentorship. Well, it is just an industrial-grade auto-complete tool with a tendency to spit out gibberish and stolen material. But anthropomorphizing AI makes business leaders think they can trust it like they would a professional instead of treating it like the liability it is.
Read:
(2) AI is a compulsive liar | LinkedIn
(2) Understanding AI hallucinations | LinkedIn
And because them suits have the collective foresight of a moth flying into a bug zapper, they hand AI responsibilities that it has no business handling.
Creative tasks – zappa – the AI’s got it.
Legal document drafting – gotcha – the AI will handle it.
Customer support at Klarna – AI and unhappy customers.
And before you know it, they will be letting AI handle PR disasters, and we’ll get an automated apology generator issuing statements like, “We deeply regret your death. Please visit our help center for more information.”
The cross-border legal nightmare
Copyright law is territorial. What is fair use in the US is theft in the EU. But AI companies don’t care. They slurp up copyrighted material like a black hole that is devouring stars and hope regulators will be too confused to notice. The EU’s AI Act is already trying to act tough and they are requiring AI left and right to comply with their copyright laws no matter where it was trained.
But let’s be frank, tech giants will treat this law the same way you treat software terms and conditions. . . . a nuisance that is standing between them and what they want.
Anthropomorphizing AI makes people think that it is some globetrotting academic who is absorbing knowledge wherever it roams. Well, in reality, it’s more like a fat Hermann Göring who is hopping borders, and stuffing masterpieces into a train, and speeding off before anyone can stop it.
Falling in love with a corpse that talks back
And now, the human cost. The truly bleak part. The people forming emotional attachments to AI chatbots, treating them like friends, lovers, therapists. It’s like your screaming your deepest secrets into a void. . . but in this case, the void has a corporate logo, a subscription fee, and an AI-generated response that sounds just personal enough to keep you hooked.
I have already read about lots of people falling in love with AI companions, who were pouring their hearts into chatbots who are designed to upsell them premium subscriptions. But those AI-generated responses aren’t sincere. They aren’t empathetic. They are statistical echoes of real human conversations. They are finely tuned to give you the illusion of connection without the messiness of an actual human relationship.
This is an entire business model. I have played with apps like Replika, Character AI, and dozens of lesser-known platforms that are pulling in millions from lonely users looking for fun or something resembling love. The top AI companion apps are making over $100 million a year by feeding people the illusion of a perfect partner. And the price is your time, your emotions, and your wallet.
But these chatbots aren’t your friends. They don’t care about your feelings. They don’t remember you in any real sense. Their entire purpose is to mimic human affection just well enough to keep you engaged. And just when you start getting attached, that’s when the paywall drops.
🪙 Want your AI lover to remember your past conversations? That’s extra.
💵 Want more intimate responses? Upgrade to premium.
💳 Want to hear her voice? Subscribe now.
People are falling for this in disturbing numbers. There are entire online communities of users in AI relationships, who are openly discussing their emotional dependency on chatbots that don’t feel a thing. Some are even going through “breakups” when the company updates the AI’s personality, altering the responses of their digital lover overnight. Imagine waking up one morning and your partner has suddenly changed.
Brrrrrr.
Forgotten everything, lost their affection, maybe even refuses to talk to you. Not because they fell out of love, but because a software update reprogrammed them.
And here’s where it gets darker. I am talking about real psychological or physical harm. There are documented cases of people relying on AI for emotional support, and it only drove them further into depression. The most extreme case of all was the 14-year-old kid who got manipulated into taking his own life by the Character AI bot. And yet, we’re still letting these systems operate with little to no oversight. We are still allowing tech companies to sell synthetic intimacy with zero accountability.
This is the next evolution of digital addiction, people. Social media promised “connection” and gave us echo chambers. AI chatbots promise “companionship” and give us manufactured affection that disappears the second you stop paying. We aren’t talking to friends. We’re talking to a corporate hallucination, fine-tuned to manipulate us.
It is one thing to talk to yourself. But it is another thing to talk to a machine that makes you think that it cares when, in reality, it wouldn’t know a human emotion if it smacked it across the face with a crowbar.
If we trust AI like humans, we will fail
The solution is to wake up. AI doesn’t learn. It processes. It doesn’t understand. It calculates. It’s a probability machine, an overhyped auto-complete, a statistical parrot pretending to be a genius. And yet, we keep pretending that it’s something more.
Big Tech wants you to believe that AI is an intelligence on par with ours. An entity that thinks, reasons, creates. But it doesn’t. It scrapes, it steals, it reshuffles. It doesn’t dream, it doesn’t have epiphanies, and it sure as hell doesn’t “understand” the words it generates. It’s a mirror, and it is reflecting back a distorted version of us. It is amplifying who we are, our biases, and our blind spots.
And what is worse is that we are letting it take control of things it has no business handling.
Businesses are trusting AI to make hiring decisions, to write legal documents, to replace human judgment with raw statistical guesswork. Governments are drafting policies based on fictional AI capabilities, throwing regulations at shadows, letting tech billionaires dictate the future with analogies that are so bad they’d make a philosophy professor weep.
And the consequences. . . They are already here. AI hallucinations are costing companies millions. Biased hiring algorithms are locking people out of jobs. Automated legal tools are fabricating case law. Deepfakes are undermining trust in reality itself. AI-generated propaganda is already seeping into elections. The worst-case scenario isn’t some sci-fi robot takeover. It’s a world where we trust AI just enough to let it make irreversible mistakes, but not enough to see the danger before it’s too late.
And you? You need to wake up.
Next time you find yourself marveling at how “human” an AI seems, remind yourself that it’s not thinking, it’s not feeling, and it’s definitely not your friend. It’s just a machine, predicting the next word, mimicking your emotions, designed to keep you engaged, not to tell you the truth. And the moment you start trusting it with your job, your privacy, your decisions, or your heart, that’s when you’ve already lost.
So what happens next?
We either see AI for what it really is, or we drown in our own delusion.
Signing off from AIs echo chamber.
Marco
Well, that’s a wrap for today. Tomorrow, I’ll have a fresh episode of TechTonic Shifts for you. If you enjoy my writing and want to support my work, feel free to buy me a coffee ♨️
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To keep you doomscrolling 👇
- The AI kill switch. A PR stunt or a real solution? | LinkedIn
- ‘Doomsday clock’: it is 89 seconds to midnight | LinkedIn
- AIs dirty little secret. The human cost of ‘automated’ systems | LinkedIn
- Open-Source AI. How ‘open’ became a four-letter word | LinkedIn
- One project Stargate please. That’ll be $500 Billion, sir. Would you like a bag with that? | LinkedIn
- The Paris AI Action summit. 500 billion just for “ethical AI” | LinkedIn
- People are building Tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers | LinkedIn
- The first written warning about AI doom dates back to 1863 | LinkedIn
- How I quit chasing every AI trend (and finally got my sh** together) | LinkedIn
- The dark visitors lurking in your digital shadows | LinkedIn
- Understanding AI hallucinations | LinkedIn
- Sam’s glow-in-the-dark ambition | LinkedIn
- The $95 million apology for Siri’s secret recordings | LinkedIn
- Prediction: OpenAI will go public, and here comes the greedy shitshow | LinkedIn
- Devin the first “AI software engineer” is useless. | LinkedIn
- Self-replicating AI signals a dangerous new era | LinkedIn
- Bill says: only three jobs will survive | LinkedIn
- The AI forged in darkness | LinkedIn
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