Here’s why AI should scare the hell out of all of us | Whale’s Tales

Published 11:30 am Friday, September 26, 2025

The voices and images produced by artificial intelligence are all around us these days, and getting more convincing all of the time.

Indeed, the technology has advanced to the point where we often can’t tell who is talking at us — a human being or AI.

Which bothers me. And as people in the know tell us, we are only at the beginning of the AI revolution.

So I’ve gotten into the habit of listening with greedy ears for tattle-tale goof-ups. During a retrospective on rock n’ roll last week on the internet, I heard the narrator mangle “Lynyrd Skynyrd” as “Leonard Sky Nerd.”

Could be, as in the above instance, AI’s unfamiliarity with a word’s specific pronunciation, bad spelling, misplaced syllable stress, or a problem too brain-bending for ordinary human brains to comprehend.

And as above, they can be funny.

But what about when the issue is no longer a simple mistake or a computer bug, a mangled verb or a twisted noun? What if we’re dealing with outright lies, deceptions, and deep fakes with malice aforethought, so convincing that only experts — and sometimes not even those guys — can say for certain whether they’re true or not?

That scares the hell out of me.

Just imagine what would happen should a voice we recognize and trust interrupt “As the World Turns” — as Walter Cronkite did to announce to announce the JFK shooting — to tell us that Russia and North Korea just fired nuclear weapons at the West Coast of the United States, and the missiles will be on us in five minutes?

Panic on a mass scale.

This is no abstract. We already have plenty of examples of shady people using AI for foul ends. This world is chock full of bad actors, and some of them are at the top of governments with all the advanced, technical capabilities of a modern state at their fingertips.

And that should scare the hell out of all of us.

Beyond the existential threat, I have other fears.

I can’t escape the conclusion that the moneyed interests, salivating like Pavlov’s dog to replace flesh-and-blood employees with AI, are not only on their own Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, but have reached its outskirts, and may soon realize a long-held dream that once seemed out of reach: severely reducing or eliminating the labor class.

I know of a large company whose top dogs are salivating like Pavlov’s pooch to go fully automated with AI. Why not? Wouldn’t that make some conscience-less fat cats wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice?

The big question is, have the guys at the top, eyes riveted on maximizing gains for stockholders and for themselves, ever asked themselves: who will buy their goods and services if the people AI has put out of a job can no longer pay for them?

I know what I’m about to say now won’t matter to most people, but I have a personal pique. AI’s stripping readings of all their human nuances. Rendering words in monotones as flat as the ghastly water of Los Angeles.

Like this beauty: “Shall … I …compare… thee …to … a … summer’s … day?”

I mean “Yechh!” to quote the great Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine fame. Something has to be missing from the hearts of people who can live with themselves after putting stuff like that out there.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.