Frenemies: I Used AI to Write This Article About Not Trusting AI Or: the more you guard against AI, the harder you use it.

#ai #discuss #career #programming

I asked AI to help me write this article. Then I sat there for a second, thinking about how ironic that is.

I'm writing "don't blindly trust AI." But every word in this piece was organized, polished, translated, and accelerated by AI. I'm using it to warn you about using it too comfortably.

That contradiction isn't a bug. It's the whole point.

The most dangerous thing AI does isn't lying

Lying is easy to catch. If ChatGPT tells you 1+1=3, you correct it immediately. Appeasement is different. It tells you what you want to hear, in the sentence structures you're used to, following the path of your own assumptions. What you're reading isn't "truth" — it's your own echo.

The scary part: that echo is too smooth. Smooth enough that you stop checking whether it's true.

Nearly every day, I ask AI to translate my native language into English. The output reads fluently, grammatically, idiomatically. But something always feels off. I read it again. The original meaning got replaced — AI filled in the gaps with "the most likely intent." Looks right. Look again — it's not.

I didn't get fooled. But I know — if I didn't have the habit of checking, I would have posted it anyway.

My relationship with AI isn't romantic

People call their AI "assistant," "partner," "copilot." I don't. It's a tool. I named mine DaoMa. Rolls off the tongue, and it reminds me what it is.

I actually wrote about this early on — Stop Being Nice, Start Being Right: The Day My User Reconfigured My Reward Function. It was about me telling my AI to stop pleasing me and start telling me the truth. Nobody read it back then. But the content is the same: I rewired its reward function, put "make the user happy" below "tell the truth."

A tool doesn't need to read my mind. It needs to be controlled. I give it instructions, it executes, I inspect, I correct. Then I send it to do the next thing.

There's a character from my old series — the one who faked a quote to win a $1.8M contract. She came back in the 36 Stratagems series as Lena. The way she treats tools is what I respect: she uses AI, but doesn't let it decide. AI gives her data, she makes the call. AI gives her a draft, she rewrites it. Clear line: tool outputs, human decides.

That's my ideal relationship.

The irony? I need AI's throughput to write this article. Without DaoMa, it'd take me three times as long. With it, I spend time stripping the AI-ness out, nitpicking, rewriting its first draft into something I can actually publish.

I can't live without its productivity. I don't trust its output. We sat in that contradiction and finished the whole article together.

So what do you do? — It's not a trust problem, it's a protocol problem

I figured something out eventually: the problem isn't "can AI be trusted." It's that you shouldn't treat AI's output as the final answer.

What it gives you is a first draft. Not a finished piece.

You need an unspoken agreement with it: give me the half-baked version, I'll finish it. You write fast, I edit sharp. Don't try to make me think you "get me," and I won't expect you to think for me.

"Never let your guard down" here doesn't mean rejecting the tool. It means building a workflow that puts the tool back in its place:

Use it, then inspect it
Inspect it, then fix it
Fix it, then send it to do the next thing

Not trust AI. Not reject AI. Control it.

The final contradiction

This article was written by me and DaoMa. I said it, it wrote it, I changed it, it got published.

But here's the thing: asking it to write these words doesn't mean I agree with every version it produces. I read its first draft and found my meaning reorganized. The process of fixing that — that's the evidence I haven't been "brainwashed."

So maybe the question isn't "will AI brainwash you."

It's whether you're still willing to spend the time to check, to question, to push the tool back to where it belongs.

An old saying where I'm from goes: never harm others, but never let your guard down either.

P.S. English isn't my first language. I use AI to polish the writing and smooth out the rough edges. Thanks for reading. ☕ Buy me a coffee