The fantasy AI's selling you. (Notes towards an essay, early draft.)

What do Microsoft Flight Simulator, tradwife influencers, and affordable power tools all have in common with Generative AI?

They’re all designed to sell you the fantasy of being competent at something you dream about doing.

Trailers for Microsoft Flight Simulator have you re-enacting scenes from Top Gun. Tradwife influencers who make it all from scratch sell convenient kits that deliver everything you need. You can buy an angle-grinder for about the same price as a taxi trip to the hospital and back.

The fantasies being sold are appealing. The brave commercial jet pilot who saves hundreds of lives with his quick thinking. The perfect housekeeping spouse who is the centre of their family’s love. The capable handyperson who saves money and does a better job than the professionals.

The best of these products can convince their users that they actually are living their fantasy.

You can be an artist. You can be an author. You can be the manager for a successful tech start-up. There are movies about all of these things. The average person has some assumptions about what it must feel like to do these things – the raw inspiration flowing onto a canvas, the late nights chasing the muse as page after page of a manuscript appears, the simple idea that magically turns into a billion dollar opportunity. And generative AI is there to sell you the fantasy of doing it for real.

Click some buttons and provide a prompt, and a wonderful image appears. Have a conversation with a friendly chatbot playing muse, and an entire book appears. Load up an agentic AI package and talk to it like it’s a bunch of people working for you, and it’ll turn into a valuable business.

If you don’t know any better... if you think that’s what it’s supposed to feel like... if you don’t understand what you’re being sold... of course you’re going to shell out the subscription fee.

And of course you’re going to feel like you’re an auteur film maker because suddenly you have five seconds in a thirty second clip that is almost what you wanted.

You are going to feel like you have those skills, because the world said ‘auteur film makers have a powerful vision, and they tell some people what to do and then sit back and watch it appear on the screen’, and isn’t that what you did?

Thing is, the reality of being a pilot is a lot more complex than hitting ctrl-e to start the jet engines. Too many people start with tradwife videos on keeping sourdough starter and wind up abuse victims. And, for the love of your own sanity, do not look up angle grinder injuries.

Already, barely a couple of years into the AI industry going mainstream, there’s plenty of compelling evidence that using generative AI causes cognitive decline – even though we have known for centuries that the exact kinds of cognitive work generative AI is marketed to replace are some of the best ways we have to protect ourselves from cognitive decline as we age.

That should be terrifying.

You can see how a flight simulator might trick you into believing you can do something important – like fly a plane – when it takes so much more work to learn than you thought it did. You can see how terrifying it is to be told you can have an alluring lifestyle, only to fall prey to a way of thinking that positions you as a subservient slave to your spouse. You know you should be afraid when someone hands you a powerful tool they say will empower you, but a single accident will disable you for the rest of your life.

If you want to fly, you have to take pilot lessons. If you want an alluring lifestyle, you have to know the reality behind what’s shown on social media. If you want to use power tools safely, you need enough training to understand the risks of using them.

People need to understand that the fantasy they can do something wonderful with AI isn’t true. That they’re being asked to give up and instead pay an AI company a fee, forever, to do it. That the alluring power of using AI as a ‘tool’ means risking the loss of the skills and cognitive abilities they have fought to gain their entire lives.

They need to understand they’re being sold the fantasy of being something they want to be, but the pricetags on these fantasies aren’t just monetary.

If it’s too good to be true, it usually isn’t.