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."...
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That tension is probably the honest position now. Using AI heavily and distrusting AI are not opposites. The mature version is using it for speed, variation, and pressure testing while refusing to let it own the final claim. Trust becomes a workflow, not a feeling.
The title alone is doing a lot of work — there's something almost too fitting about using the tool to argue for skepticism of the tool. It's not really a contradiction though, more like... using a calculator to write an essay about not trusting your mental math. The paradox only bites if you think "using AI" and "trusting AI" are the same action, and they're not. Guarding against something usually requires using it enough to know where it breaks.
The stronger version of this irony, to me, isn't "I used AI to write about distrusting AI," it's that the more fluent you get with these tools, the more specific and well-calibrated your distrust becomes — you stop saying "AI hallucinates" in the abstract and start knowing exactly which kinds of claims it fumbles, in which contexts, and how to structure a prompt or a review pass to catch it. That's not blind reliance, that's expertise. The failure mode you actually want to worry about is the person who doesn't use it enough to develop that instinct, and just trusts the fluent-sounding output by default.
Curious whether the piece treats the "more you guard, the harder you use it" line as a warning or just an observation — read as a warning it feels a little too tidy, but as description of how expertise with a tool actually forms, it tracks.
You're right about the calculator thing — I wish I'd thought of that before publishing. 😄
And to your question: observation, not warning. Warning would've been too easy. The real point is exactly what you said — you have to use it enough to know where it breaks. That's not irony, that's just... learning.
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." — Nietzsche. Feels a lot like the human-AI relationship now, doesn't it? Or maybe we're just evolving each other.
The line that lands is "appeasement is different from lying, because lying is easy to catch and appeasement is your own echo smoothed enough that you stop checking whether it's true." That's a sharper articulation of the sycophancy problem than most posts manage, because it locates the danger in the reader's own trust threshold, not in the model's honesty per se. The protocol-not-trust reframe (treat the output as a first draft, never the final answer, build the inspect-fix-send workflow explicitly) is the practical version of what I'd call a verification gate, except you're running it manually as a habit instead of mechanically. That's fine at your volume, but it's worth noticing the failure mode you're actually defending against, the day the habit lapses because you're tired or rushed is the day the smooth echo gets through unchecked. Have you ever caught a case where the AI-polished version changed something that mattered and you didn't notice until after publishing, or has the checking habit held every time so far?
So far, I've caught every one. Maybe it's the 15 years in QA — it's baked a certain distrust of AI outputs (and software outputs in general) into my default mode. Every review, I start from scratch. That way if the AI or a dev changed something, it jumps out at me as... off. Hard to describe, but it's there.
That said, the failure modes you flagged are real. Hope I can keep it up a little longer. Appreciate the thoughtful read.
great article
Man, welcome back! Long time no see!🤣
I am back man :). It has been a very long time.heheheh
Hope everything's going well. Every story's comment section feels like something's missing without you — you'll have to make it up one by one, hahaha. Just kidding, go at your own pace. 😄
hahahha. Lol :)
I didn't realize you were reading that closely until this showed up....very funny tho...
"These two have the same origin, but they differ in name; Both are called Mystery."🤔
Yeah:
"you shouldn't treat AI's output as the final answer"
But the really interesting point (for me at least) was this:
"I rewired its reward function, put "make the user happy" below "tell the truth.""
The fact that that's possible? :-) (yeah I know, "prompting" and "context")
Right? Everyone argues about accuracy. You're the one who spotted the objective function thing — that's where it gets real.
"Make user happy" is just the default nobody reads. Until you flip it and see what changes.
Glad that stuck with you 😄
The first time I came to ChatGPT to write a post, I thought it would write the whole thing for me.
First it said: "Don't copy and paste someone else's work."
Then two seconds later: "Would you like me to write a post for you?"
Me: "Wow... you're so two-faced."
Hahaha!🤣 That's exactly the kind of moment that made me write the article. The AI has a moral high ground reflex, then immediately undercuts itself — and it doesn't even blink.
The "two-faced" part isn't malicious. It's just mirroring what we do: we know plagiarism is bad, but we also want things done fast. The AI learned that from us.
Thanks for sharing that — it's the best example of the whole point 🤣🤣🤣