I think we can agree that granting someone full access to the open internet without education or tools to protect themselves would be dangerous, no?
OK, but what is a general-purpose LLM but a collection of everything that the model could ingest, without rules about what was safe and what wasn’t?
Yet we expect people to use them, and aren’t making any effort to make them safer.
This is the instruction manual. Make everything seem dangerous and chaotic, then offer simplistic fixes and explanations that aren’t true at all, but fit a narrative you wish to manipulate people with. As Seth describes, the easy thing to do is to accept those explanations and stop thinking about it much further. We are hard-wired to do that. We’ve been educated to do that. We’ve been told simplistic lies like the world is fair, and good things happen to good people, and we believe it because the truth is much less comfortable.
The article above, however, makes it clear that our brains take shortcuts to make quick decisions. In doing so, the number of times we see something that isn’t true can impact whether we treat it as false or true. They say familiarity breeds contempt when it comes to other people, but maybe familiarity with shared information breeds acceptance, regardless of the truth.
That is frightening in a world where tens of thousands of posts can be created in minutes.
This article gathers input from multiple experts and continues for 28 paragraphs without once mentioning the employers’ expectation that we do all the things they tell us not to do.
It’s all well and good to point out that setting boundaries, saying no, ending our work day on time, etc., are good ways to avoid burnout. It’s another thing entirely for many of us to have that option in the first place.
Personally, I’ve moved away from using the POP feature in Gmail to import mail from other email accounts into Gmail to take advantage of the spam protection. Since I host my own sites and my own M365 tenant, much of that spam protection lives elsewhere for me, but I can understand why others have continued to use it.
But it’s going away.
Never fear, though. In 2026, Google wouldn’t dare let you have a product that doesn’t feature AI. So, we’re all getting the AI Inbox, and you will have to opt out if you do not want an AI-generated list of to-dos and summaries instead of just reading your email.
I’ve always written under the assumption that people were reading what I put out here and, hopefully, learning something. In the age of AI-slop, I want more of that, and only that. I’m seeking it out and connecting with it. I am not connecting with people who are creating crap content in a chase for attention. Bring your authentic self, or I’m ready to assume your account is AI slop.