AI Is Here. Now What?

I have a confession.

I use artificial intelligence.

There. I said it.

I use ChatGPT.

I use AI professionally.

I use it to brainstorm.

To research.

To organize ideas.

To challenge my own thinking.

To help me write.

To help me build a business that, frankly, would be significantly more difficult to build alone without it.

And apparently, according to certain corners of the internet, this makes me a terrible person.

I've been called out.

I've been criticized.

I've blocked people.

I've watched perfectly lovely posts about my business turn into bizarre moral indictments because I used AI somewhere in the process.

And honestly?

Sometimes I laugh.

Because we have officially reached the stage of technological history where people are yelling at one another about whether using a tool is morally acceptable while other people are quietly using that same tool to build companies, solve problems, automate work, analyze data, create content, and make money.

Some businesses figured this out early.

They're benefiting enormously.

And some people are still standing on the shore yelling at the ocean.

The ocean doesn't care.

It's already here.

Love It or Loathe It: AI Is Here

Let's get one thing out of the way.

You don't have to like artificial intelligence.

You don't have to use it.

You don't have to trust it.

You don't have to believe it will make the world better.

Those are legitimate positions.

But pretending it isn't happening isn't one of them.

Artificial intelligence is becoming embedded in medicine, education, business, government, finance, manufacturing, media, research, entertainment, transportation, and virtually every other sector of modern society.

The question is no longer:

"Will AI exist?"

It does.

The question is:

"What are we going to do with it?"

And that question matters enormously.

Because technology itself is rarely the moral actor.

Human beings are.

A hammer can build a house.

It can also break a window.

A printing press can spread revolutionary ideas.

It can also spread propaganda.

The internet can democratize information.

It can also create an industrial-scale misinformation machine.

AI is no different.

The technology isn't going to decide what kind of civilization we become.

We are.

And Yes, I Use It

I'm not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of appearing intellectually pure.

I am a solopreneur.

I'm building Aletheia Courses.

I'm running a business.

I'm creating content.

I'm marketing.

I'm writing.

I'm researching.

I'm managing technology.

I'm doing things that, in a traditional organization, might be distributed across an entire team.

AI gives me leverage.

That's not shameful.

It's strategic.

For small businesses especially, AI can dramatically lower the barriers to entry for people who don't have the capital to hire a marketing department, research assistant, graphic designer, copywriter, data analyst, or software developer.

And that's actually one of the things I find most exciting about it.

Technology has always had the potential to democratize capability.

The printing press did.

The personal computer did.

The internet did.

AI may be the next iteration.

A person with an idea and a laptop can suddenly do things that once required an entire organization.

That's powerful.

And power, as history repeatedly reminds us, deserves scrutiny.

But scrutiny is not the same thing as rejection.

Here's Where the Conversation Gets Complicated

Because if you think I'm about to tell you that AI is going to save humanity, I'm not.

It won't.

AI can produce garbage.

It can hallucinate.

It can confidently tell you something completely false.

It can amplify bias.

It can reproduce misinformation.

It can make it easier to manufacture convincing lies.

And it can be used by people who have absolutely no interest in truth.

The Brennan Center for Justice recently tested several major AI systems specifically around election misinformation.

Their findings are fascinating.

The encouraging part?

The chatbots they tested generally pushed back against a series of common election conspiracy theories—even when researchers repeatedly challenged them.

That's potentially useful.

People increasingly use AI as an information source, and a system that refuses to reinforce demonstrably false claims could theoretically become another tool for combating misinformation.

But then comes the other side of the equation.

The researchers found that the same AI ecosystem made it remarkably easy to create deceptive election-related images and video.

In their testing, safeguards were inconsistent.

Some models generated deceptive media.

And the researchers found that the systems themselves often struggled to identify whether AI-generated material was authentic.

Even more concerning, the study found significant factual errors and citation problems in chatbot responses about election-related topics.

That's not a reason to abandon AI.

It's a reason to understand it.

Remember The Great Hack?

If you've watched Netflix's The Great Hack, you already understand the basic philosophical problem.

The documentary examined the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the weaponization of personal data in political campaigning.

The unsettling realization wasn't simply that companies had enormous amounts of information about us.

It was that information could be transformed into influence.

Our clicks.

Our likes.

Our fears.

Our preferences.

Our identities.

Our attention.

Data became political ammunition.

And that was before generative AI exploded.

Now imagine combining enormous quantities of personal information with systems capable of generating persuasive text, images, audio, video, and individualized messages at extraordinary speed.

That's not science fiction.

That's a governance problem.

And it's a democratic problem.

The technology doesn't merely give us the ability to create more content.

It potentially gives governments, political campaigns, corporations, activists, bad actors, and ordinary citizens the ability to manufacture persuasion at scale.

That should make every political party uncomfortable.

Which is precisely why we need to stop thinking about AI in simplistic categories.

AI isn't Republican.

AI isn't Democrat.

AI isn't capitalist.

AI isn't socialist.

AI isn't inherently benevolent.

AI isn't inherently evil.

It's infrastructure.

And infrastructure can be used well or terribly depending on who controls it, what incentives they have, and what safeguards exist.

The Great Irony

Here's the part that makes me laugh.

Some of the people screaming the loudest about AI are simultaneously living inside technological systems they would never voluntarily abandon.

Smartphones.

Google.

Social media.

Streaming services.

GPS.

Online banking.

Cloud computing.

Amazon.

Netflix.

Algorithms.

Autocorrect.

Search engines.

Facial recognition.

Digital payments.

We don't generally reject technologies because they have externalities.

We negotiate with them.

We regulate them.

We adapt to them.

We learn their risks.

We establish norms.

Then we keep moving.

AI deserves the same seriousness.

Not worship.

Not hysteria.

Seriousness.

And There Is a Cost

This is where I think AI advocates—including myself—need to be intellectually honest.

AI isn't free.

The data centers powering increasingly sophisticated systems consume enormous amounts of electricity and water.

The physical infrastructure required to sustain AI at scale has environmental consequences.

There are questions about employment.

Questions about intellectual property.

Questions about privacy.

Questions about concentration of corporate power.

Questions about who owns the underlying models.

Questions about whether increasingly powerful systems should be regulated.

Those aren't "AI hater" questions.

They're legitimate questions.

In fact, asking them is precisely what responsible technological adoption should look like.

The answer shouldn't be:

"Stop using AI."

It should be:

"How do we make AI worth using?"

That's a much harder question.

And therefore a much more interesting one.

Evolve or Die

Every technological revolution creates winners and losers.

The Industrial Revolution destroyed some jobs and created others.

The automobile destroyed entire industries while creating new ones.

Computers eliminated certain forms of work while generating entire professions that didn't previously exist.

The internet obliterated some business models and created others.

AI will do the same thing.

The question isn't whether jobs will change.

They will.

The question is whether individuals and institutions will adapt quickly enough.

That's where my patience gets thin.

Because I don't think telling people to simply reject technological change is compassionate.

Especially when the people with the most resources are already adopting it.

If large corporations, governments, universities, and wealthy organizations use AI to increase productivity while ordinary people are told they're morally suspect for using it?

That's not a sustainable philosophy.

That's a new digital class divide.

And I want no part of it.

We Don't Need Less Thinking. We Need More.

This is where Aletheia Courses comes in.

If anything, the rise of AI makes genuine education more important, not less.

Because when machines can generate a polished essay in seconds, the valuable skill isn't merely producing an essay.

It's knowing whether the essay is bullshit.

When AI can summarize a book, can you recognize what the summary omitted?

When AI gives you a citation, will you check whether the source actually says what the AI claims?

When an AI-generated video shows a politician saying something outrageous, will you believe your eyes?

When an algorithm tells you something you desperately want to believe, will you ask whether it is true?

The Brennan Center's research provides a useful warning here: even when chatbots challenged election misinformation, they still made factual errors and sometimes supplied faulty or nonexistent citations.

So no, AI doesn't eliminate the need for critical thinking.

It raises the price of not having it.

And perhaps that's the opportunity hidden inside all of this.

The Aletheia Approach

Use the tool.

Question the tool.

Verify the tool.

Challenge the tool.

Don't outsource your judgment to the tool.

That's my philosophy.

I use AI.

And I also know that AI can be wrong.

Those statements aren't contradictory.

They're the beginning of intellectual maturity.

The answer to technological uncertainty isn't ignorance.

It's education.

The answer to misinformation isn't censorship alone.

It's discernment.

The answer to AI isn't fear.

It's responsibility.

And the answer isn't pretending we can put the genie back into the bottle.

We can't.

So let's stop arguing about whether AI should exist.

It does.

Instead, let's have the much more consequential conversation:

What kind of society are we going to build with it?

Because the technology is not going anywhere.

The only question is whether our wisdom can keep up with it.

And if history has taught us anything, it's that technology tends to move much faster than human beings learn how to govern themselves.

Maybe this time...

we should try to keep up.