The Unspoken Victims of "AI" Hype

Regularly in my day to day life I run cheap tech support for a bunch of the elderly people in my area. It keeps them from being predated by Geek Squad's anti-virus sales quota or paying through the nose at another shop they can't afford.

So this has put me in some actually interesting situations. One of those situations I tried to relate last night was about one of the senior citizens I work with on the regular. Since I'm writing Long-Form style now I can give more context.

The ChatGPT Incident

I get a call late one evening and it's J, her personal PC is offline, her husband's PC is offline, and the office PC is loading things very, very, very slowly.

So I tell her I'll be over tomorrow afternoon, I don't wanna drive in the dark and all that jazz. I get there about 2PM the next day after doing some personal errands and as soon as I walk in this is the full sentence that my ears are blasted with.

"ChatGPT is stopping me and R from using the internet, and this one is really slow."

I want you to take a second to digest that bit real quick. ChatGPT is somehow stopping this woman from using the internet. This woman is in her 80's she's never touched ChatGPT (I can confirm I looked at her browser history) and she somehow, someway, thinks that it is the culprit behind her inability to access the internet.

Her, her husband, and her eldest adult son all think that "AI" is capable of just knocking people off the internet for no reason because they've heard all the hype around "AI" and it's been conflated with Sci-Fi films from the 80's and 90's in their minds. I've learned this through a number of visits where I fix their PCs and the oldest son broaches the topic of AI with me.

The conclusion of this visit? Her middle son (an adult) couldn't get on the WiFi with his iPad when he was visiting so he ripped all the LAN cables out and rearranged them so that none were actually connected to the Spectrum Router and the Spectrum Modem was connected directly to the AT&T router (don't ask).

That was it. It wasn't "AI," or Antifa, or a malicious government org. Just her dumb son, doing dumb shit.

Brain rot, pure unadulterated brain rot created by the "AI" industry. The second something malfunctioned (because of human intervention) they blamed "AI" because of the hype around it. This is far from a defense of "AI," no this is an accusation that "AI" is making already paranoid, tech illiterate people, more paranoid and tech illiterate, and they don't even have to touch "AI" for that to happen.

This isn't an isolated case either, J isn't the only one of my elderly people to blame "AI" for something. Another said "AI" logged her out of her Facebook, it didn't. It was her grandson clearing cookies and history after looking up porn.

Another said that her security cameras weren't working because "Claude" took them down. Claude did not take them down, the NVR (not connected to the internet to start with) just up and died because it's 15 years old and was already on it's way out.

The "AI" industry is doing more harm than good by co-opting the AI label for fancy text prediction algorithms and then hyping that it can do all these amazing things like program and research and shit like that and senior citizens are paying a price for it, they live in fear that Grok might suddenly hack their phone for Israel and turn their phone into a bomb when they walk into a government building (true story, someone local to me actually thinks that).