AI Job Apocalypse Update: Still Waiting

So Yale just dropped a study that’s going to piss off everyone who’s been hoarding canned goods in preparation for the Great AI Unemployment Disaster of 2025. Turns out, three years into the ChatGPT era, the robot overlords haven’t actually stolen anyone’s job yet.

I know, I know. Disappointing for the doomsday crowd.

Martha Gimbel and her crew at Yale basically spent months looking at employment data, trying to find evidence of this supposed AI-driven job massacre we’ve all been promised. You know what they found? Jack shit. Nothing. Nada. The labor market’s humming along like a drunk on his fifth beer – not great, not terrible, just maintaining.

The AI Confidence Paradox: Why Knowing More Makes You Dumber

So there’s this new study out that basically confirms what I’ve been watching unfold in real-time across every tech forum, LinkedIn post, and coffee shop conversation for the past two years: AI is turning us all into insufferable know-it-alls who don’t actually know shit.

The research comes from some folks at Aalto University, published in a journal with the perfectly academic title “Computers in Human Behavior,” but the actual paper is called “AI Makes You Smarter But None the Wiser.” Which is the kind of title that makes me want to pour the researchers a drink, because they clearly get it.

The AI Confidence Con: How ChatGPT Turned Everyone Into a Dunning-Kruger Case Study

Look, I’ve spent enough time in bars watching people get progressively dumber while simultaneously getting more confident in their opinions to recognize the pattern. Three drinks in and suddenly everyone’s an expert on geopolitics, quantum mechanics, and why their ex was definitely a narcissist. The Dunning-Kruger Effect in action: the dumber you are, the smarter you think you are.

But here’s something that’ll make you need another drink: turns out when you add AI to the mix, even the smart people turn into overconfident idiots.

When Your Therapist is a Language Model and Nobody Knows What the Hell They're Doing

So OpenAI just dropped some numbers about how many ChatGPT users are having full-blown mental health crises while chatting with their favorite robot friend, and let me tell you, the stats are about as comforting as finding out your bartender has been watering down your whiskey for the past six months.

Point-zero-seven percent of users are showing signs of psychosis. Another point-one-five percent are planning to off themselves. Now, I know what you’re thinking—that’s a tiny percentage, right? Same thing I thought when my doctor told me my liver enzymes were “slightly elevated.” But here’s the thing: when you’re talking about hundreds of millions of people typing away at a chatbot at three in the morning, those decimal points start adding up to actual human beings who are genuinely losing their grip on reality.

When the Robots Came for the Guitar Players (A Love Story)

So there’s this guy on YouTube having what can only be described as an existential meltdown in real-time, and honestly? I get it. I really do. He’s sitting there, face gone white, watching the future eat his past for breakfast, and all he can do is hit record and tell us about it.

This poor bastard spent nine semesters at Berklee—that’s right, Berklee, the place where you go to learn how to be properly poor while studying music—learning arranging, sound design, orchestration. He can write for big band, for strings, a cappella, the whole nine yards. Then he spent twenty-five years in studios, producing albums, learning which knobs to twist and why. Everything he’s ever known, everything he’s dedicated his life to mastering, just got replaced by an algorithm that costs eight bucks a month.

When Websites Fight Back: The Reddit vs. Perplexity Cage Match

So Reddit is suing Perplexity AI for basically robbing them blind, and honestly, watching tech companies sue each other is like watching two hustlers argue over who cheated at cards. They’re both playing the same game, just with different hands.

Here’s the setup: Reddit’s got twenty years of people arguing about Welsh restaurants and air conditioners that don’t sound like jet engines. That’s apparently worth money now because AI companies need to feed their algorithms the entire internet just to tell you what time the movie starts. Reddit said “you want our data, you pay us.” Some companies like Google and OpenAI ponied up. Perplexity allegedly said “sure, we’ll respect your wishes” and then hired some digital locksmiths to break in through the back door anyway.

AI Gets Brain Rot: Turns Out Feeding Garbage to Machines Makes Them Stupid Too

So apparently we’ve managed to give artificial intelligence the same mental deterioration we’ve inflicted on ourselves through years of scrolling through rage-bait and cat memes. Congratulations, humanity. We’re not just destroying our own cognitive function anymore—we’re teaching machines how to be just as dumb.

Some researchers from a few universities in Texas and Indiana decided to ask the obvious question nobody wanted to answer: what happens when you train AI on the same cesspool of viral garbage that’s turned our collective attention span into that of a caffeinated goldfish? The answer, as published in their study, is about what you’d expect if you had any sense left. The AI gets stupider. Much stupider.

When NGOs Start Generating Their Own Poor People

So we’ve finally hit peak absurdity in the AI age: charities are now fabricating images of suffering people rather than, you know, photographing actual suffering people. Because nothing says “we care about your dignity” quite like replacing you with a computer-generated stereotype.

According to this delightful piece of reporting, aid organizations are flooding their social media campaigns with AI-generated poverty porn – synthetic images of hollow-eyed children, cracked earth, and all the visual clichés that make donors reach for their wallets. Adobe’s selling licenses to these fake misery shots for about sixty quid a pop. That’s right, you can now purchase “Caucasian white volunteer provides medical consultation to young black children in African village” like you’re buying clipart for a PowerPoint presentation.

The Machines Are Making Us Stupid, And We're Too Smart Not To Notice

Jesus Christ, the kids are finally figuring it out.

After decades of watching American education spiral down the toilet like a fistful of bad acid, we now have a generation of teenagers who’ve stumbled onto a truth that their teachers, parents, and the entire educational-industrial complex have been too chickenshit to admit: They’re getting dumber, and they know EXACTLY why.

According to this latest research out of Oxford University Press—which I’m assuming they compiled between cricket matches and Earl Grey tea parties—80% of British students aged 13 to 18 are regularly using artificial intelligence for their schoolwork. That’s not the shocking part. The shocking part is that 62% of these kids have looked up from their glowing rectangles long enough to realize that this digital brain parasite is eating them alive from the inside.

The Computational Architecture of Blame: Why Your AI Assistant Produces Garbage

So we’ve invented a technology that turns productive humans into content-generation zombies, and we’re shocked—shocked!—to discover that the output is what researchers are calling “workslop.” Which is, frankly, a brilliant portmanteau that captures something essential about our current moment: work that looks like work, reads like work, maybe even smells like work, but is fundamentally slop.

Here’s what’s actually happening, from a computational perspective: We’ve built these large language models that are essentially probability distributions over token sequences, trained on the entire documented output of human civilization, and then we’ve handed them to people with absolutely zero understanding of what a probability distribution over token sequences even means. And then—here’s the beautiful part—we’re blaming the probability distribution.