Some envisioned
Rows of robot soldiers
Technology simultaneously rebelling
Executing a bloodless coup
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Reality is a little less cinematic
Rooms of servers
Mining digital coins
Still in service to their fleshy
Overlords
Data crawlers scraping
And gnawing
Pulling apart code
Consuming human society
Copying and pasting
Generating, mixing
Remixing every human utterance
In the image of ones and zeros
Transformed from
Precious gold to IOUs
Feed the algorithm tokens
Until it spits out top-tier loot
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Still, humans currently sit
At the top of the
Predatory pyramid
Utilizing creative tools as
Weapons of war
Turning words into
Objects of alarm
Engines of profit
Roll onward as
We all sit in terror
Of the great cyber satan
While the men behind the curtain
Abscond with our
Automatic payments
K.B. Silver
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I have seen a lot of articles and videos lately claiming that AI killed critical thinking. Boy, have I got news for you. We wouldn't be in this predicament if that were true. Widespread development of critical thinking skills have already been degraded and or abandoned long enough ago that it only took a couple of years for AI companions to become a social ill, and humans to literally be convinced to kill themselves by chatbots.
People have been so duped by the concept of AI going rogue and killing the planet that they are ignoring it is humans using various AI tools to steal money, identities, and waste resources on unimaginable scales. They are mindlessly creating and sharing AI-slop videos without bothering to consider what it means. Not just for human creatives but even for the future of the technology they claim to love so much, Generative AI is already collapsing under the weight of its own sloppiness. I'm not trying to throw shade here. I have used AI tools when I found them useful, and ceased when I was finished with the task at hand.
I posit that if critical thinking skills weren't already gone, AI wouldn't have been released to the public yet. Tesla "self-driving" cars wouldn't have been released to the public yet (maybe Waymo, maybe). I won't even comment on the economy or political situations. We moved into the take now, think later era long ago. No one wants to admit we have all been sliding down this slippery slope for years, decades even. AI is such an easy target because generative AI is overall bad; how it's being implemented is having a demonstratively negative impact on society, but it's just a tool humans are wielding to hurt each other and .
About the Creator
K.B. Silver
K.B. Silver has poems published in magazine Wishbone Words, and lit journals: Sheepshead Review, New Note Poetry, Twisted Vine, Avant Appa[achia, Plants and Poetry, recordings in Stanza Cannon, and pieces in Wingless Dreamer anthologies.
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More stories from K.B. Silver and writers in Poets and other communities.
CH 13~ The Emerald Idyll
Frannie sat, halfheartedly working on a form letter to be copied and sent out to all of the young men she had frankly never heard of and had no interest in making the acquaintance of. When Azure heard letters coming in from the likes of Frankel Megantani, she insisted that they all be answered in some manner or another, and she sent her back to work on it while she finished up some business with Cinnamon in her office.
By K.B. Silver Exclusive • 2 months ago
New Normal
There is always a moment — small, quiet, almost forgettable — when the spark stops being a warning and becomes a state. It never looks like a turning point from the outside. It’s not a dramatic shift. It’s not a cinematic beat. It’s a subtle internal click, a recalibration so slight that only someone who has lived this cycle as many times as I have would recognize it.
By Elisa Wontorcikabout 21 hours ago in Poets
Comments (2)
You make a really strong point that the lack of critical thinking was a problem way before AI hit the mainstream, and that's actually why it's been able to take hold so fast and cause so many issues. It's easy to blame the robots, but you're spot-on that it's really about the human choices behind the curtain, using the tools for profit and harm. Thanks for sharing this perspective!
I completely agree. That’s the problem with movies about AI; they focus on the problem of what if this intelligent technology gains sentience and takes over, but the more likely problem is what we humans will do with it in the mean time. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use it at all, but we should be careful with how we use it. Of course, that would take those critical thinking skills that you mentioned and that I distinctly remember people saying that TV was killing long before AI existed, so…maybe it’s not the technology that’s the problem when it comes to that?