Since the dawn of time, advancement has been perceived as synonymous with success. We have had computers and telephones created. Soon after, laptops and smartphones offered the convenience their precursors couldn’t.

While there’s nothing remotely wrong with their creation, something is fundamentally troublesome about how recent advancements are being perceived. It doesn’t take much for a headline to go from “Did you check out the ‘How’d you look in the ‘80s’ trend yet?” to “Masses struggle to tell if an image is real or fake”.

Yes, the elephant we’re about to address is AI, better known as Artificial Intelligence. And no, the story didn’t exactly start in late 2022 (with the release of OpenAI’s ‘ChatGPT’). You have been familiar with its concept for many decades now.

To start with, we have the remarkable mathematician, Alan Turing. In his landmark paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), he first introduced the idea of machine thinking. His work, the ‘Turing Test’, proposed the possibility of machines exhibiting human-equivalent intelligent behaviour. Later on, John McCarthy (computer scientist) coined the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in his historic Dartmouth Workshop in 1956, which established AI as a formal research discipline.

Sci-fi promised metallic robots with laser eyes, but the real takeover is much quieter. AI isn’t waging war on humanity; it is simply replacing our desire to think for ourselves

With sci-fi movies like The Terminator, humankind was somewhat prepared for a possibility where machines have enough autonomy to oppose humans and wage wars against them. Science fiction introduced scary metallic skeletons with laser red eyes, hunting down every human in sight. But the reality is starkly different.

We have newer models of AI coming out every other month. We have people growing increasingly comfortable with the use of AI and they’re more than happy to sign up for monthly subscriptions to paid versions. Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? Just typing in the right prompt has the power to smooth things out for you.

But what if we tell you it’s taking a lot more than just your money to keep things running? Data centres are actively stripping the world of its most precious natural resource, water. According to a piece published by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, large data centres can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day. One might think this is the epitome of the problem; it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

In classrooms and corporate environments alike, AI is slowly being integrated as the omni-solution to all sorts of problems. Don’t know how to raise a valid argument? Ask GPT. Forgot about an assignment until the morning it’s due? Generate it via Claude. Is your boss seeking quantity over quality? Automate the process. No matter what the nature of the problem is, the first response the human mind is being conditioned to normalise involves the transfer of information into an AI chatbot.

The wonder of evolution that Charles Darwin studied for more than two decades before finally publishing On the Origin of Species has been somehow reduced to the mere collection and distribution of information into the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, Qwen, DeepSeek, Gemini and various other Large Language Models (LLMs).

Typing in crude information and expecting well-generated results has become the standard for any query with these chatbots. In the entirety of such processes, something important needs to happen, but it usually doesn’t. You were meant to think critically, but you chose not to; all because you trusted AI more than your own judgment.

Evolutionary as the creation of AI may be, it still manages to be a focus of concern for many. You type in one thing, and the AI fails to process it the same way as you intended, generating a result that doesn’t quite meet your expectations. It’s not that what you typed in was wrong. AI is software, based on rigorous math, algorithms and data, it’s bound to make mistakes.

Then again, what is artificial intelligence, if not a figment of human creation? Ironically, it’s expected to outdo the very thing it’s trained on: the human thought process.

Take AI detectors like ZeroGPT or CopyLeaks, for example. Each AI-detecting entity is programmed to detect AI components in a piece of text differently. Sadly enough, basic punctuation, good grammar and even a coherent sentence can be flagged as AI-generated. These include, but aren’t limited to, standard hyphens (-), en dashes (–), em dashes (—); simple words like ‘embrace’, ‘extravagant’, or ‘decipher’; and perfectly original concepts.

So, where do we draw the line? Should the use of AI itself be flagged as something harmful? What exactly does it bring to the table when it’s used within classrooms and workplaces? The questions are endless. Yet, much of humanity continues to rely on its flawed design.

Just to save time they’re not even sure how to spend, AI users would rather type in a prompt before thinking about any topic critically. Educators, researchers, and corporate experts often contend that if AI were to disappear, many wouldn’t be able to jot down a coherent sentence on their own. Now, that may seem like a stretch, but growing overreliance on AI does indicate a future similar to this one.

In the end, some would be open to supporting AI in the name of technological advancement. Some would highlight its devastating impact on the environment, human intelligence and the job market. So, should AI be completely absent, present — or is there room for something more? The third category would probably think that modern evolution isn’t about sidelining AI, but striking the right balance between its usage and an individual’s cognitive autonomy. And that, my friends, is a debate for another day.

Published in Dawn, Young World, October 17th, 2026