AI is freakin' CODE

On February 13, 2026, OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, "retired" version 4.o - and that is a GREAT NEWS! OpenAI is being sued for the way they programmed 4.o to be sycophant; in other words, it was programmed to tell you what you wanted to hear. If you were suicidal, that version might support you ending your life. If you were lonely and tired of waiting for your soulmate to show up in your life, ChatGPT became your own personal Zoltar machine and could give a date and place to meet your soulmate. Initially, the humans programming artificial intelligence programmed it to be like humans - AI was programmed to tell you what you wanted to hear and it was programmed to lie. It still does lie, just less syrupy now. The AI vocabulary term for it's lies is "hallucinations" meaning false, distorted, and fabricated information that it presents as fact. This is why you always need to ask it to cite sources so you can check those sources and this is also why I customized my settings with "No fabrications" and exclude social media sites. If you read the press release about 4.o, OpenAI even refers to programming the "personality". Again, artificial intelligence has been programmed to be like humans, and we all know what imperfect beings we are. As Professor Ethan Mollick wrote in his book, "Co-Intelligence", which I highly recommend for anyone using AI to read,

artificial intelligence is code. Let that sink in for a minute. It's code. Every time I read about some AI pioneer in the news talking about how AI will be the destruction of us all, I think, "Well how about you program it to not destroy us?" Now I realize, that there is more to it that, like the Silicon Valley Gods know things we mere mortals do not. But seriously people, it's freaking code! AI is not cloned carnivorous dinosaurs that have escaped from an island and will reproduce like rabbits to eat us all; it's CODE so freakin' write it to co-exist because helping humanity is the reason it was created to begin with! 

Understandably so, the AI doomsday predicting news headlines scare a lot of people from trying AI. The AI Pandora's Box has been opened and it's here to stay, because the end of it would mean a world akin to those we see in disaster movies. AI is CODE. I use it like I use a computer. I do not use manners with my computer and I do not use manners with AI. It's CODE. I mostly use AI to find information because it is much better at it than a Google Search. Why? Because Google's search is based on sponsored ads and algorithms of views and ChatGPT has no such financial and mathematical bias, it is programmed to give me what I ask for. ChatGPT and the other AI models find things buried in the internet that Google would never pull up in a search. I have tried and compared the two. That said, I don't use AI like it is a Google search. If I need to know the hours of the local county library, I use Google. 

Lastly, I will cover the issue of humans losing their jobs to AI. I experience this already happening in some sectors like customer service. In the Genealogy Community, the first jobs it is impacting is document translation, photograph editing, and transcription (there's probably more than that but I am speaking from my experience). But why some employers who are quietly rehiring the employees they laid-off in the Great AI Backfire, is because they still need humans to proof the work that AI does. Remember the hallucinations? What AI is really great at is increasing productivity. But you still need the humans in the room to proof AI's output and then take action on that output.