AI Drug Dealers

It is a familiar tactic employed by drug dealers (this includes pharmaceutical companies) across the world. Give the customer a free taste of your drug, get them addicted to the point they cannot "live" without, then charge them whatever you want. And they will pay. They will pay with their money, their health, and even their very life.

Technology and media companies are fundamentally no different in their methods. Their methods are just more socially accepted (or ignored) by the public and elected officials. When the people pushing the drug are making barrels of money, and lining the pockets of the decision makers in the process, why would anything fundamentally dangerous be stopped?

Look at the detrimental effect of social media. Companies have pushed the drug onto the unsuspecting populous, distorting reality, and laying the groundwork for mass manipulation of the public.

How often have you been sent a social media post that has the sender enraged only to find out it is completely fake? When you are out in public, do you ever see someone NOT staring down at their phone?

Artificial Intelligence is the next big drug being pushed. All the major players out there offer free versions of their platforms to get people to try it in the hopes they will get it so incorporated in their daily lives that they can no longer "live" without it.

AI as a Tool

AI (not ASI) alone, outside of any context, is a tool. By itself it is neither good nor bad. Depending on who is wielding it, and for what purpose, it can be powerfully helpful or dangerously destructive. Much in the same way a hammer can be used to build a house or cave in someone's skull.

For those with existing subject matter knowledge, AI is incredibly useful. It saves an inordinate amount of time by summarizing content, writing & securing code, and working through complex tasks.

For those without existing subject matter knowledge, like those just entering the workforce, AI can be potentially dangerous. Primarily because those just starting out have not built up a good enough bullshit meter to know when something that AI spits out is not quite right.

What remains to be seen is if AI will help people become more educated and competent in what they are trying to achieve. Or will AI generated content be rubber stamped and trusted explicitly without any critical analysis to truth or harm.

AI as a Drug

AI can also be used to control those addicted.

Media executives dictate/manipulate what can and cannot be done on their platform. They choose profits and happy shareholders over preventing children and the uneducated from becoming addicted and being exposed to dangerous situations. If they were oil/gasoline executives, they would put lead back into gasoline to generate more profit if they could get away with it.

AI is the new frontier for manipulation.

Publicly available AI models supposedly have "guardrails" to prevent the platform from being misused.

For example, take this interaction using Claude's Sonnet 4.6 model:

The above is great but if the above can be done, then can so this imagined interaction and response:

This is where AI gets dangerous. Both for addicts and non-users of AI.

We have already seen Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demand Anthropic give the US military access to Anthropic's models without any safety guardrails to allow the use of Claude "for all legal purposes."

It will be too late for "legality" once a bioweapon has been designed, developed, and deployed against a population without any real oversight.

The ultimate fear is this:

1. Get people hooked
2. AI consolidates into 1 or 2 companies
3. Knowledge and power consolidates even further to just a few people

The printing press and widespread availability of books once allowed the public to become informed and empowered, decentralizing knowledge away from institutional gatekeepers.

Will we see a reversal of that decentralized knowledge with AI?