Post by Carly Taylor

AI is making things I once enjoyed sort of terrible…. Reddit has become unusable. It’s looking more like Moltbook every day with bots just chatting away farming for karma. LinkedIn is becoming somehow more sycophantic and empty. People are speaking more and saying much less. Even at work, 50% of the emails and Slack messages I receive are suspiciously AI-like. Our reaction to the cognitive overload of being a human brain in a swamp of AI drivel is, ironically enough, to surrender to the AI. This phenomenon is called cognitive surrender. According to researchers at Wharton, participants who were given logic problems with free access to an AI assistant followed it 80% of the time. The kicker is, the AI was secretly programmed to be wrong 50% of the time. Yet, participants’ confidence in their answers increased 12%, regardless of whether the AI was correct. They felt smarter. Yet they were wrong more often. So how do you insulate yourself? 1. Vote with your attention. Don’t use platforms you don’t like until they fix it. 2. Call out (kindly) when someone is sending you AI slop. Don’t take on the cognitive load of reviewing it. Push back. 3. USE YOUR BRAIN. For the love of god, write your own emails and slack messages. You’re not only getting dumber by outsourcing your whole brain, you’re also pissing me (and probably all of your coworkers) off. Stop it.