Ocarina of Time is my GOAT. Finishing it as a kid and realizing that games could be more than just killing time, that they could be epic journeys with satisfying endings, that they could be a whole art form was really transformative.

I saw someone in advertising a few days ago saying that using AI generated images in their ads kills their sales with gen Z. Gen Z can spot errors in shadows, inconsistencies in textures, small tells that boomers and gen X largely can’t. As a millennial, I can spot a lot of AI, though every so often something slips through. But when I see a youtube channel with an AI generated image, or a business with an AI generated advertisement, or a game on steam with AI generated thumbnails, I click the three dots and ignore.

I think most advertising companies are going to find that the more Gen Z and millennial customers they have, the less they’re going to want to use generated images.

Weird, people keep telling me that all the added energy costs of the blockchain, crypto, NFTs, and training AI/LLMs over the past ten years are overblown and not contributing to climate change. It’s so weird how all those things just happened to coincide with accelerated warming.

It’s good you’re being cautious about it but it would be better to not use it at all. A recent Scientific American article showed that AI autofill suggestions change how people think about a subject just through suggestion, even if they don’t use the autofill. And people who use it are often unaware of their own knowledge gaps, so self-reporting about effectiveness is useless. Using it even a little bit is probably putting metaphorical micro-plastics in your brain.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-autocomplete-doesnt-just-change-how-you-write-it-changes-how-you-think/ https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/

Protect your brain

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My current list of reasons why you shouldn’t use generative AI/LLMs

A) because of the environmental impacts and massive amount of water used to cool data centers https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117

B) because of the negative impacts on the health and lives of people living near data centers https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o

C) because they’re plagiarism machines that are incapable of creating anything new and are often wrong https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-ai-limit-our-creativity/ https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2024/06/20/why-ai-has-a-plagiarism-problem/

D) because using them negatively affects artists and creatives and their ability to maintain their livelihoods https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2713374523000316 https://www.insideradio.com/free/media-industry-continues-reshaping-workforce-in-2025-amid-digital-shift/article_403564f7-08ce-45a1-9366-a47923cd2c09.html

E) because people who use AI show significant cognitive impairments compared to people who don’t https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

F) because using them might break your brain and drive you to psychosis https://theweek.com/tech/spiralism-ai-religion-cult-chatbot https://mental.jmir.org/2025/1/e85799 https://youtu.be/VRjgNgJms3Q

G) because Zelda Williams asked you not to https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0r0erqk18jo https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-07/zelda-williams-calls-out-ai-video-of-late-father-robin-williams/105863964

H) because OpenAI is helping Trump bomb schools in Iran https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/06/openai-pentagon-tech-surveillance-us-citizens/88983682007/

I) because RAM costs have skyrocketed because OpenAI has used money it doesn’t have to purchase RAM from Nvidia that currently doesn’t exist to stock data centers that also don’t currently exist, inconveniencing everyone for what amounts to speculative construction https://www.theverge.com/news/839353/pc-ram-shortage-pricing-spike-news

J) because Sam Altman says that his endgame is to rent knowledge back to you at a cost https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-intelligence-will-be-a-utility-and-hes-just-the-man-to-collect-the-bills-2000732953

K) because some AI bro is going to totally ignore all of this and ask an LLM to write a rebuttal rather than read any of it.

“I’ve found the tool useful.”

Cool, have fun breaking your brain with the technology you don’t understand while ignoring every new study that comes out that says it’s bad for you while supporting billionaires whose stated goal is to sell knowledge back to you as a resource

LLMs don’t have any historical knowledge, they produce reasonably coherent blocks of text. There’s a reason people call them slop machines, because their primary purpose is to produce a lot of text, not any kind of correct information. The fact that they’re sometimes correct is a coincidence, and is the reason why they’re incorrect up to 60% of the time. It doesn’t matter if a book was written in the 1600s or the 1950s or 2026, because the LLM is not going to have any cogent information about it that isn’t a statistical accident from smashing different sources together indiscriminately.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/ai-search-engines-give-incorrect-answers-at-an-alarming-60-rate-study-says/

Google is evil. From the propagation of surveillance capitalism, to their selling of tech space to the highest bidder deteriorating the global knowledge base, to their suppression of information that US oligarchs find distasteful, they can’t be reasonably trusted to provide accurate information.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/

So you’re using autocorrect made by dishonest Larry to help you read about the rise and anatomy of fascism? You’re likely poisoning your own well and not even realizing it.

Trust me, I know. They won’t stop at people of color, they won’t stop at Jews, they won’t stop at trans people, they won’t stop at queer people, they won’t stop at white women, they won’t stop at poor white people. They’ll redefine whiteness and maleness and citizenship as many times as they need to in order to take as much power and wealth as they can. But the question was specifically about the people ICE had snatched up

Stephen Miller and Donald Trump and all of those people in the Epstein cohort are white supremacists, they want all nonwhite people to die or become slaves. They might deny that, they’ll say “Oh no, we just want immigrants to come in through proper channels,” but you can look at their treatment of Native Americans and see who they really are. The endgame is just that anyone who’s not white is no longer alive, no longer in the US, or no longer a free person.

Knowing what I know about LLMs and Google, using the Google LLM as a reading assistant seems like possibly the worst idea.

Yeah, that headline is incorrect. The laws are there specifically to surveil adults, “for child safety” is a smokescreen justification. This isn’t a “we tried to do a good thing, but there’s this unfortunate side effect,” the surveillance was the goal.