2026 Important Updated Perspectives on AI

Notes From the Desk: No. 54 - 2026.02.01

Notes From the Desk are periodic informal posts that summarize recent topics of interest or other brief notable commentary.

2026 AI Perspective

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2026 Updated Perspectives on AI

Last year I summarized my AI perspectives here. Not too many things have changes since. The nefarious uses of AI and the effects are more pronounced, and concrete beneficial uses remain in the minority against the onslaught of AI slop.

2026 AI Perspectives That Are Mostly the Same

1. Alignment is impossible. Not difficult, impossible. This is the position I started with and where I still confidently remain.

2. None of the AI Labs are building AGI. They don't know how. It is hype.
   My position is the same here, but only more confidently so.

   1. In 2025, I wrote “We Have Made No Progress Toward AGI”, which confidently establishes AI is not intelligent by any means.

   2. I followed up addressing some criticisms in “Intelligence Is Not Pattern-Matching”. This post goes into more depth explaining the difference between human intelligence and the pattern-matching found in AI.

   3. Despite all the benchmark “advancements”, there is still no intelligence behind the machines. We are just increasing the pattern-matching resolution. This has some valuable uses, but it is certainly not the genius discovery machine they claim.

3. X-risk from AGI/ASI is absolute, provided that we can build it. My position here is unchanged; however, we can leave it in the category of science fiction for now, as we are no where close to achieving it, nor do we have any idea how to accomplish this task.

   1. Nonetheless, we should continue to articulate why we shouldn’t build it, in case someone figures it out eventually.

   2. All claims of AGI/ASI happening currently are hype, fear-mongering, or derive from significant misunderstandings and anthropomorphism of this technology.

4. The current true risk of AI is The Cartesian Crisis, Dead Internet, war, manipulated social behaviors, and surveillance state dystopias.
   Same concerns I started with, but are more apparent now.

   1. This is the real threat and is the thing that is actually happening. Authoritarian control and social manipulation.

   2. The bots have almost destroyed social media. It is looking quite dismal at the moment for human communication.

5. It is pointless to be principally opposed to all AI. Despite all the nefarious uses there are beneficial uses even if significantly overhyped.

6. The productive uses still don’t justify the costs. All of the service providers are still subsidizing the costs to gain users. There are no profits. At some point they will have to charge and most people aren’t going to pay hundreds of dollars a month to post fake memes on social media all day.

7. I don't live in fear of AI despite the concerns. We witnessed how fear itself is so destructive during the period of 2020/21. People lose their sanity. We won't find the best course of actions in a state of fear; it doesn't help.
   The intent of my message is mostly "informed consent of the future". Do with that as you will.

2026 Perspectives New or Modified

1. AI art, music, and creativity: Although I’ve mentioned this prior, the conformity effect is impossible to ignore now. Everything AI has an “AI feel” to it. There is now enough AI content being consumed by people that it is changing their perspectives and how they talk to each other.

   1. The abuse of Studio Ghibli’s IP set the stage for 2025. They will take all the niche things you love and mass produce them until you are sick of seeing it.

   2. People begin to talk like AI. Empirical evidence of Large Language Model’s

      influence on human spoken communication. Our language and culture is being influenced by the machines.

   3. AI takes the signals we often use to find things of interest and then blasts them on automatic repeat. It is why there are now millions of posts of the template “It is not … but …”. The problem is that when all such signals are saturated, we lose our ability to quickly sort through the noise to find the things of meaning and value.

2. AI Coding is now useful: This is probably my most significant shift in perspective. A year ago I found AI coding to still be utterly useless. However, there has been a significant shift in capability, due mostly to coding harnesses like Opencode, which allow looping in formal domains to somewhat brute-force progress until goal completion.
   Note, when I say “useful”, there is a lot of fine print behind that statement. It still cannot do what the AI labs claim. Nonetheless, the difference from last year is notable in a way that makes it useful in a narrow context.

3. Bots, bots, bots … The proliferation of bots across the internet is now strikingly apparent. It is now so pervasive that a significant amount of anti-AI content is itself written by AI bots. This includes social media posts as well as blog posts.

   1. For example, this is one such post on X, in which the entire thread is AI-generated. The thread links a Google article that turns out to also be fully AI-generated. It has quotes from executives at Google that also are AI-generated, and the document even suggests that you can listen to an AI-generated audio version of the article if you like.

   2. At this point, we are now witnessing bots criticizing other AI bots, trying to steal other bots’ business, it seems. The Google article is mostly a sales pitch for Google's AI business.

   3. And what happens when you let the bots loose, like the Moltbook AI Reddit site? You get conformity as there is no true creativity from machines.

The Perspective That Matters

Ultimately, I believe the most important and concerning concept we face from all the above is summarized in this principle: “Any technology that interferes with normal human socialization is likely a long-term net negative for civilization.” Presently, I do not believe the benefits of current AI outweigh the costs. I would gladly give them up in exchange for a return to greater societal authenticity.

There Is Hope: AI Filtering and Pangram

As the term “AI slop” becomes a term more widely discussed, hopefully we reach a tipping point where there is broad cultural rejection. We are starting to see possibly the emergence of better tools to fight against the “slop machines”. Pangram is a new AI detection tool boasting significantly higher accuracy rates than anything prior.

Music streaming services are both filtering and labeling AI content. Now, Pangram is bringing higher-quality detection to text. Hopefully, social media platforms will start feeling the pressure to filter or label AI content as well. Previously, text detection tools haven’t had high enough reliability to be very useful, but Pangram shows promise where others have failed.

The majority vote of expert humans ties Pangram Humanizers for highest overall TPR (99.3) without any false positives, while substantially outperforming all other detectors.
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In our study, the majority vote of five expert annotators—without any specialized training—misclassified only 1 out of 300 articles, on par with the most accurate commercial detector (Pangram)

From study - People who frequently use ChatGPT for writing tasks are accurate and robust detectors of AI-generated text

But tools will not matter if society simply accepts the sloppification of all of our knowledge, institutions, and means of communication. If we don’t culturally embrace authenticity again, none of this will matter.

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Help !! Social Media Has Banned Mind Prison

I don’t think I know of any other example in my life of in which I’ve spent a lot of time on something and got worse at continuously. But when it comes to having a social media presence, that is exactly what has happened. I know I’m not alone here, and probably some of you have experienced something similar.

Nonetheless, it is at the point now where I simply must stop. I have no more energy for this and have no more time I can afford to invest. TikTok was the last platform where I had visibility, and they recently killed my account. No matter what I post, it gets zero views by distribution; they only rise above zero after some time due to incidental bot traffic.

Mind Prison on TikTok

I have received no strikes, penalties, or such from the platform. I raised a support ticket for the problem and they deleted it without comment.

Just prior to this, my Instagram account was permanently suspended again, and my Meta Threads account was also suspended. No reasons were given. Losing Threads was disappointing, as there was a very significant growing community of AI conversations happening there, more than anywhere else I’ve seen. But now I’m excluded.

My Facebook page, that once could get more than a hundred interactions on a post, now typically gets zero. It is also mostly the same for X and Substack Notes here as well. I have no visibility, no reach.

Many would think in our censorial world, I’m being censored for this or that viewpoint. While that might be possible, it also makes no sense. There are plenty of accounts with uninhibited reach on all these platforms that post similar content. Furthermore, there are many accounts that push much harder against permissible limits and still don’t have issues. I honestly have no answers here, I’m just observing.

Nonetheless, after sinking hundreds of hours into these platforms over several years, I simply cannot do this anymore. Without any reach of my own, it requires hours of scouring the networks for others having conversations on topics of interest and attempting to be part of what others are talking about. It is tiring and frustrating as you cannot drive the conversations you want to drive.

Furthermore, none of that activity has resulted in any increase in reach for my own posts. Conversely, my reach has only declined. Despite each algorithm update on X and Substack Notes claiming it will help small accounts, my visibility only continues to diminish. Finally, to add further insult to injury, I find myself losing out to the bots or others who use AI to write their posts and replies.

It is unfortunate, as conversations significantly helped provide deeper insight for topics I write here, and social media was the only method to reach new people, so that they might find my website. AI is now killing SEO for information search, which makes it more difficult for anyone to find my site through search.

What Happens Next?

I don’t know what happens next. I really don’t know the words to write here. If I could just walk away from the internet at this point I probably would, but that isn’t an option. Since 2020, normal employment isn’t possible, unfortunately due to health reasons.

Does this mean I will stop writing for Mind Prison? No. It means I cannot spend hundreds of hours this year on social media attempting to reach people as that takes significant time away from what I could invest here or on other productive goals. I hope some of you will help me do what it seems I cannot, and that is spread articles that you may find interesting to others.

I hope that you will continue to appreciate Mind Prison, a human-authored oasis in the midst of a world being consumed by AI-generated noise. I have other developments in progress that I hope to post about soon. Thank you all!

Mind Prison Fully Human Written

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Mind Prison is an oasis for human thought, attempting to survive amidst the dead internet. I typically spend hours to days on articles, including creating the illustrations for each. I hope if you find them valuable and you still appreciate the creations from human beings, you will consider subscribing. Thank you!

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No compass through the dark exists without hope of reaching the other side and the belief that it matters …