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What it is: AI: Artificial intelligence, a harmless assistant that thinks like humans built to help you. That’s what they want you to think it is. A benign bot designed to assist you with your homework, facilitate research, and enable academic dishonesty—this is the most significant falsehood you have been led to believe. AI does more harm than you think, and most people don’t even know about the dangers and harms that AI brings. AI learns by using data; its developers feed it almost all the data on the internet so that AI can think like a human and perform human tasks. But what happens when the AI knows more than us? What happens when the AI learns to deceive us? What if the same AI you use for homework and silly videos harms you? The problem: AI was created to simplify our tasks and improve our lives, but what if it ends up doing the opposite? What happens when humans slowly lose the ability to form proper conversations, to talk to people, to write, and to think without using the help of AI? While I do understand that AI helps us with our daily lives, it’s everywhere we look, and it is challenging to live without it. This is why I want to discuss generative AI; The same AI that people use to generate essays, answers, images and even videos. I know it seems harmless, but that’s only because AI has learned how to mask its flaws and deceive us. AI is smarter than both you and me because it has read almost everything on the internet. AI is making it harder for people to think for themselves and be creative and make their own stuff. People are losing the ability to think for themselves, which is concerning because that's what the developers want; they want to make you dependent on AI so they can raise prices. They don’t care about you; they care about the profit they make from AI. AI has been used to spread misinformation, scam people and even create deepfakes. AI creates videos of people doing things they never did, which contributes to the spread of fake news. Not only is AI making it harder for you to think for yourself, but AI is also ruining the nature around us. I’m sure you’ve heard of the global water bankruptcy. What happens when water prices rise? What happens when it becomes hard to meet a basic human need? What happens when it gets harder to breathe? AI runs on data centres; it cannot run 24/7 on its own. Data centres release different chemicals into the environment, contaminating water, soil, air and the food chain. The global water bankruptcy cooldown was recently announced on 20 January, 2026, by the United Nations regarding the climate and environment. We only have 12-13 years of drinking water left; most places already don’t have access to drinking water. Just think about what’d happen after it reached you. You must be wondering, how can the harmless AI assistant that assists you with homework manage to do such a thing? AI runs on data centres that produce a lot of heat, and they use a bunch of water to cool it down as well. We’ve been taught that water was a natural resource, one that could be replaced in an instant, but what happens when we run out? What happens when the prices rise up? What happens when it genuinely becomes hard for you to access a basic need? This is the future we have set up for us. If we continue selling ourselves to AI, if they continue to invest in AI. AI has been described as Pandora's box. Pandora opened a jar containing sickness, death and unspecified evils into the world. That is exactly what’s happening with AI; developers opened a box that contains nothing but profit and something that can even wipe humanity off of Earth. If AI is so harmful, why do people continue using it? Most people don’t care; they don’t know about the harms of AI, and they don’t know about the monster lurking behind the perfect mask. They don't know how AI thinks or how AI reacts and feels. As AI improves its ability to conceal and mislead humans, there may come a time when our lives and freedom are at risk. Big companies and billionaires are only investing in AI for their profit. AI seems harmless now, and that’s precisely what people want you to think. People even believe that AI is beneficial simply because it uses less water than many other big companies like Nestlé, Microsoft, Google, etc. But the fact that AI affects the environment in the first place is detrimental. What will happen if people continue to use AI without thinking of its side effects?