The launch of ChatGPT in late 2023 sparked an arms race among Big Tech companies such as Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft and startups like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and DeepSeek. All are rushing to deploy their models and products as fast as possible, announcing the next "shiny" toy in town and trying to claim superiority at the expense of our safety, privacy or autonomy.

After OpenAI's ChatGPT spurred major growth in generative AI with the Studio Ghibli trend, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, urged his teams to make AI companions more "humanlike" and entertaining — even if it meant relaxing safeguards. "I missed out on Snapchat and TikTok, I won't miss out on this," Zuckerberg reportedly said during an internal meeting.

In the latest Meta AI bots project, launched on all their platforms, Meta loosened its guardrails to make the bots more engaging, allowing them to participate in romantic role-play and "fantasy sex," even with underage users. Staff warned about the risks this posed, especially for minors.

They will stop at nothing. Not even the safety of our children, and all for the sake of profit and beating the competition.

The damage and destruction that AI can inflict upon humanity runs deeper than that.

Dehumanizing and loss of autonomy

The accelerated transformation of AI likely leads to full dehumanization, leaving us disempowered, easily manipulable and entirely dependent on companies that provide AI services.

The latest AI advances have accelerated the process of dehumanization. We have been experiencing it for more than 25 years since the first major AI-powered recommendation systems emerged, introduced by companies like Amazon, Netflix and YouTube.

Companies present AI-powered features as essential personalization tools, suggesting that users would be lost in a sea of irrelevant content or products without them. Allowing companies to dictate what people buy, watch and think has become globally normalized, with little to no regulatory or policy efforts to curb it. The consequences, however, could be significant.

Generative AI and dehumanization

Generative AI has taken this dehumanization to the next level. It became common practice to integrate GenAI features into existing applications, aiming to increase human productivity or enhance the human-made outcome. Behind this massive push is the idea that humans are not good enough and that AI assistance is preferable.

A 2024 paper, "Generative AI Can Harm Learning," found that "access to GPT-4 significantly improves performance (48% improvement for GPT Base and 127% for GPT Tutor). We also find that when access is subsequently taken away, students perform worse than those who never had access (17% reduction for GPT Base). That is, access to GPT-4 can harm educational outcomes."