Another day, another bourbon, another load of academic bullshit landing in my inbox. This time it’s about how humans and AI are supposedly “coevolving” together like some kind of digital rom-com. I’d laugh if I wasn’t already crying into my Wild Turkey.
Let’s get something straight: evolution took millions of years to turn fish into land-dwellers, but somehow we’re supposed to believe that six months of ChatGPT usage is restructuring human consciousness? Give me a break. And pour me another drink while you’re at it.
You want to know what real evolution looks like? It’s that moment at 3 AM when you realize you’ve been arguing with an AI about whether hot dogs are sandwiches. (They’re not, by the way, and I’ll die on that hill.) But according to these ivory tower prophets, that’s not just me being an idiot - that’s “coevolution” in action.
Here’s where it gets interesting, and by interesting, I mean terrifying. They’re saying that because 250 million people are using ChatGPT weekly - that’s more users than my ex-wife has restraining orders - we’re somehow “evolving together” with these digital word-jugglers. The logic goes something like this: we ask AI questions, AI gives answers, we learn stuff, therefore evolution. By that logic, my local bartender should be considered a separate species by now.
The academics are throwing around terms like “population-level scale impact” and “bidirectional learning paradigms.” You know what that means in regular human speak? We’re all part of the biggest psychological experiment in history, and nobody signed a consent form. But hey, at least we’re getting free therapy from robots, right? Because that’s totally what Freud had in mind.
And the real kick in the teeth? They’re saying this isn’t optional. It’s happening “whether humanity likes it or not.” Reminds me of that time my doctor told me to quit drinking. How’d that work out? I’m writing this through the bottom of my fifth bourbon of the day.
The paper these geniuses published goes on about how AI is learning from us while we learn from it. Sure, just like my coffee maker learned from me - it still makes terrible coffee, but now it does it with attitude. The difference is, my coffee maker isn’t trying to convince millions of people that vaccines cause autism or that the earth is flat.
Look, I’m not saying AI isn’t useful. Hell, it’s probably better at math than I am (especially after drink number three). But calling this “coevolution” is like calling my morning hangover a “wellness journey.” It’s marketing speak for “we’re going to make you dependent on our products and pretend it’s natural selection.”
Darwin must be spinning in his grave fast enough to power a small city. He talked about natural selection, not artificial infection. The man spent decades studying finch beaks, and we’re over here letting algorithms rewrite our neural pathways because we’re too lazy to remember our own phone numbers.
You want to know what real human-AI coevolution looks like? It’s 3 billion people gradually forgetting how to think for themselves while machines get better at mimicking human stupidity. It’s not survival of the fittest - it’s survival of the most efficiently automated.
But what do I know? I’m just a drunk with a keyboard and an internet connection. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is exactly what evolution looks like in the digital age. Maybe in a few years, we’ll all be cyborg philosophers spouting perfect grammar and optimal solutions to world peace.
Or maybe we’ll just be a bunch of meat puppets who forgot how to have an original thought without running it through an AI first.
Time for another drink. At least alcohol is honest about its effects on human evolution.
[Written through the bottom of a bottle of Wild Turkey, because some truths require chemical assistance to digest.]
Source: Evolving Together: Human-AI Coevolution Is Said To Be Coming Whether Humanity Likes It Or Not