People Don't Like to Be Deceived (by AI)

One universal experience for humanity is that we don't like to be deceived. It sucks, and it erodes trust. Yet, we're expected to engage with and accept the deception machine, genAI, each day. It's no wonder people are tired of it. Trust in Your Community Every May, my colleague and I take students with us to Japan. The point of the trip is to show them what life is like as a student in Japan while exposing them to Japanese culture and engineering. It's a great time! I recommend checking out a couple of my last two reflections for more details: 2025 and 2026. I bring up Japan because it's often used as an example of a "high-trust society." If you've never heard the term, it basically describes places where people generally do the right thing (i.e., behave). I think Japan gets this label because people are usually quiet on trains, do not litter, and don't do crime. Personally, I find the idea of a "high-trust society" to be a bit reductive. Like, is Japan a high-trust society just because you probably won't get pickpocketed? After all, you still might lose your bike, umbrella, or panties. Also, I don't love the term "high-trust society" because it sets up all kinds of weirdos to make arguments like, "Japan is high trust because it's ethnically homogeneous." That said, suppose high-trust societies were a thing, and you wanted to work toward one. How would you do it? Certainly, I think most folks would like to build more trust in their communities. Then, why would we unleash the final boss of deception on our society? Yes, I'm going to rant about generative AI again. The Need to Maintain Optimism in the Face of Deception There really aren't many things I hate more than being lied to. I think we can kind of all agree on this. Like, what's worse: someone telling you they're not interested in hanging out OR someone telling you they're happy to hang out before backing out last minute? I'll take the blunt rejection every time. After the first time, it's easy to be charitable. People make mistakes. That's life! But, what if they do it again? How would you feel? I assume you would start to feel like you were being led on, lied to, and deceived. It hurts. Your trust erodes with that person. Hell, maybe they let you down again, which causes you to start questioning their motives. Are they trying to hurt you, or are they just incompetent? Maybe, it gets bad enough that you start questioning yourself. Did you do something wrong? That spiral is caused by an act of deception. It's painful because it signals that the other person thinks you're stupid. They think they can get away with it. And, maybe they can but not because you're stupid. It's because you see the good in everyone. You haven't been jaded, or you resist cynicism. Personally, I think that's good, necessary even. I believe we should fight pessimism at every turn (except maybe pessimism of the intellect). Otherwise, the cynics win: a brighter future will not be possible. The problem is that it's extremely difficult to weather the storm now. Because while we might be able to look past the actions of one person, we can't possibly avoid the onslaught of deception in the form of slop. Deception at Every Turn While the very premise of generative AI (i.e., to produce output indistinguishable from reality) is deception, this was only possible through the first act of deception: obscuring the fact that these models are trained on all of humanity's collective knowledge. In other words, it's deception all the way down. That said, let's take a look at a few ways you might be deceived on a day-to-day basis now thanks to generative AI. You might manage a repository that receives pull requests from bots posing as humans. No one wrote or read the code, but you're expected to review it (and yes, the maintainer is within their right to poison the bots). You might listen to a song on Spotify that was generated entirely by AI. No real artists, musicians, or instruments. No concerts you can attend, and no real person who will benefit from merch sales. Just a corporation stealing money from real artists. Or, maybe you hear a catchy new song, only to find out the "artist" doesn't even know the lyrics. You might watch a video about an elderly man creating shoes, but the shoes are drop shipped and the old man doesn't exist (or maybe he does). You might search up some advice on how to manage your pancreatic cancer and be told by Google's AI summary to "avoid high-fat foods," which is apparently dangerous. You might submit an application for a job, only for it to never reach another human. Your effort completely invalidated by an algorithm. Or worse, you might receive an interview, only for it to be with an LLM. You might teach a class and find that you no longer have students who don't complete work. Everyone is submitting assignments, even if they didn't do the work. Then, you're once again stuck reviewing work that no human ever bothered to complete. On the flip side, you might have a teacher using AI to grade all your assignments. Why even have a teacher at that point? You might order food at a drive-through, only for the "person" taking your order to butcher basic asks. What was a seamless experience is suddenly infuriating. You might watch a news story about how innocent folks were murdered in a bombing, only for the government to defer blame to AI. It seems the deception can go both ways (i.e., being deceived by AI and deferring responsibility for "mistakes" to AI). You might get an email from a colleague and notice that the text isn't quite in their voice. If they didn't bother to write it, how is it fair that you have to spend time reading it? You might go on social media and see that your friends are posting memes that include the patented piss filter. You know your friend can't edit an image to save their life, yet they're posing as some comedian online. You might enter into a writing contest, only to find out the winners all used AI to write their stories. What's the point of putting in effort if the selection committee can be deceived by slop? Is the committee even reading the stories, or are they using some AI to review them? You might go to the doctor and find that they're not actually listening to you. Instead, their using an AI note-taking tool to transcribe your concerns. Better hope it does a good job, I guess. Hopefully, it's clear from this list that there are so many ways you might be deceived by AI on a daily basis. Frankly, it's exhausting. It's no surprise that folks are checking out or engaging in witch hunts and purity tests. After all, the most sinister part about being deceived is that you begin to distrust otherwise honest work. Is my favorite band using AI to write their lyrics? Are my favorite authors using AI to edit their passages? It's why I find it so infuriating that folks say things like "it's the future" and "it's inevitable," as if we've failed to get with the times. No, you failed to consider the consequences—or worse, you don't care about them—and now you're trying to give merit to the sunk cost fallacy. I do not and will not partake in generative AI because I refuse to normalize deception. After all, as the ol' Dune quote goes, "thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." At this point, you might be wondering if I would be okay with using AI if folks are transparent about their use. After all, there is no deception if you are clear in how you use it. This seems to be the "ethical" approach that academic journals are taking, at least in my neck of the words.To be honest, I don't really have a solid argument against this, but I am still not a fan. Given how little friction is involved in using AI, I have a hard time trusting someone who says, "Oh, I only used it for this small part of the project, not the whole thing." Like, why only use it there? If that was such a small portion of the work, couldn't you have done it yourself?Also, given how many folks are ashamed of their AI usage, it's in their best interest to continue deceiving you. It's like the fake-it-til-you-make-it final boss: able to display skill without any of the expertise. Of course you would want to continue faking it for as long as possible. Why would you ever disclose the truth?So, to me, even disclosing your AI usage is a slippery slope. You start by using it to "edit" emails. Then, you're using it to "edit" papers, and before long it's just "writing" the papers. At some point, you're just in too deep to be honest about your usage. It's Not Just AI I know I rant a lot about AI, but deception is kind of the entire modern playbook. Anyone heard of prediction markets? Yeah, that's just legalized insider trading masquerading as "not" gambling. I mean Polymarket is literally running a deceptive ad campaign right now. Like, I don't even know if I can trust sports anymore—the one and only area of our lives that is meant to approximate meritocracy. After all, plenty of folks have been caught throwing games to cash in on sports bets. I mean I've ranted about this already. Talk about another way we're being deceived. I guess my whole point is that the dystopia is here. Nothing is real, and we don't even have to wait for all the cool science fiction technology. Like, the Bill Gates mind control microchip conspiracy seems a lot cooler than the smoke and mirrors required to obscure the rapid enshittification of everything. On the plus side, it seems like I didn't have to wait long for the tide to turn on AI. What was popular just over a year ago seems to be hated by just about everyone, so this series is less "the hater's guide to generative AI" and more "the hater community dunks on generative AI." Anyway, I hope you've been enjoying these posts. If not, they're at least cathartic for me. I'll get back to writing about other stuff soon enough. That said, if you are enjoying these, I promise the series is growing rapidly. You'll have plenty to read about below: I Made the Mistake of Visiting the Vibe Coding Subreddit What Happens When I’m Forced to Teach AI? Why I Rebel Against the Use of Generative AI Likewise, I would love it if you ran over to my list of ways to grow the site. Over there, you'll find links to the Patreon and more. Otherwise, take care!