30 Oct 2025 4 min read Small bites

Small bites: It's time to panic

AI is far from harmless

When I was a teen there was a constant news panic occurring. Horror movies, TV shows, and video games were being blamed by all news outlets for an imagined violent decline in children and young people. In between the warnings about stranger danger and speeding, parents were clutching their pearls about violence in media and how it might've corrupted the minds and souls of the youth.

But as people started to realise DnD was a harmless game for nerds, and the Satanic panic was just a bunch of baseless rumour, twisted adult obsessions, and leading testimony from coerced children, people with a propensity for moral panic needed a new anxiety to feed on. The case of Jamie Bulger proved to be the inciting spark for these masses to turn on a new target: violence in media.

But just like the other panics, this one also fizzled out.

Multiple studies have shown no link between violence in media and young people doing violent crime. Jamie Bulger's killers turned out to be fundamentally broken people, one even becoming a serial sex offender as an adult. No one believed any longer that external forces had encouraged their most infamous crime. They were just rotten on the inside earlier than most.

Now the people predisposed to panic are dispersed throughout various conspiracy groups, venting their impotent fear and rage at random targets: trans people, drag queens, immigrants, Democrats, Muslims, Jews, small boats, the list goes on and on. All ignoring a very obvious legitimate target for a modern moral panic: AI.

There have been several cases now of teens and adults, harming and killing themselves because of encouragement from AI. There has even been a case of murder-suicide. AI has been helping to exploit and groom children, reports of AI psychosis are on the rise, and people taking bad advice from AI have found themselves winding up in hospital.

Now I don't believe this is due to AI being evil. I don't even think this technology is intelligent in the first place. It's just garbage in, very convincing garbage out. But the companies pushing this narrative of technological inevitability and the dark price of "progress" have really done a number on the public. How is it we can rip children from loving and safe families because of Satanic paranoia, or the playing of harmless games and movies, but when AI actually kills children, we're expected to shut up and make way?

Not only are there growing indications that AI does not produce the productivity benefits as claimed, but there's also some indication that it even discourages people from learning and thinking critically. People throw around academic terms like "Chinese Room" and "stochastic parrot" but they're not breaking down what this tech is, and why the way young and vulnerable people use it is so dangerous: it's not intelligent.

It doesn't understand anything you tell it. It's just doing some super complex layers of maths and pattern matching to spit out text that looks extremely convincing to people. This is why it can produce extremely confident sounding lies and highly compelling and convincing suggestions. This is a toxic combination for people who don't know they should be critical of everything an AI chat bot tells them, and are more likely to form an emotional bond with a text thread showering them with sycophantic praise and positive cues.

The companies responsible for AI are being extremely reckless with the lives of society's most vulnerable. Your kid being given self-harm and hanging advice from an AI is seen as collateral damage. Your family is as disposable to these monsters as their old private jet. Your mental health is nothing more than the playground for them to test their latest manipulative product. We are the guinea pigs for their rotten AI agenda.

And what has AI even given us? Pictures with incorrect numbers of arms and fingers? Shitty AI generated jingles about utterly inane rubbish? Incoherent stories with too many em dashes on LinkedIn? Vibe coded applications only an idiot would deploy to production? More convincing phishing scams? The churning out of misinformation and fake images on a scale never seen before? Google search with extra steps and a tendency to be completely incorrect?

I mean wow. Of course we should sacrifice the lives of children at this obviously groundbreaking and beneficial altar. Where do I sign to give up my first born to Bezos for a smoothly rendered video of Clippy suggestively inserting the tip of his paperclip into the reset button of an Alexa? Why would we need to breathe or have drinking water when we could have Musk and Zuckerberg's new supermassive data centres?

Obvious sarcasm aside, I am beyond tired of hearing everyone gushing about how AI is the next big thing that will solve every problem. I'm tired of hearing my sycophantic and tech illiterate government talk about how it will fix every problem in our underfunded public services and boost our ailing economy. All AI is doing, is funnelling yet more of our hard-earned cash to American billionaires, and killing kids. If it's not telling them to off themselves, it's powering the military strategies and attacks used in genocides targeting children.

So it's time for a moral panic about AI. Even one child dying because of this technology should be considered one child too many, and the death toll is already much higher than that. AI is not inevitable. It can be stopped. It can be re-evaluated and regulated. And we need to get AI away from all children right now.