AI Enabled Apps Top User Subscriptions
You pay because you love AI and you stay because you would like to deny that
Everyone hates AI—or at least, that’s what they say loudly over dinner with friends, while checking on notifications instead of each other. They scroll YouTube or TikTok as they lack ability of reading and comprehension of Google Search results. Then they wake up three hours later with a PhD-level understanding of raccoon rescue videos.
We complain about the rise of machines, but are willing victims of of algorithm-driven online existence.
People love to pretend, “AI is ruining creativity and culture” whereas their entire reading and binging lists comes from AI-powered recommendations, invisibly served up by—you guessed it—an algorithm.
The same critics who swear they’d never “trust a robot” are also the ones convinced Netflix is their soul-mate because it suggested a documentary about competitive beatboxing at the exact moment they assaulted their neighbour and their cat with a vocalisation of percussion in the balcony. You didn’t know such intricate relationship could exist with apps, yet you deny it in front of strangers on SubStack who are prospective, paying, subscribing, suckers for your lies.
The irony is obvious; we resent AI in principle but worship it in daily practice. As long as someone doesn’t access a full-fledged AI app—its all cool and dandy. Apps enabled through AI that guide your unemployable skills to a remote possibility of earning a dollar a month is thus the preferred choice of your social media use and communication.
Instagram will tell you which reels to watch and like, Twitter or X, or whatever it is this week, decides who you’re mad at today, and Spotify has the audacity to know your moods better than your therapist, implanting an ear worm as remedy through AI generated playlists built solely for you.
Meanwhile, Substack addicts claim they’re supporting “independent voices,” which they are—but only after the algorithm gently nudged them to read what their private data revealed would be likeable reading material.
When was the last time you used SEARCH functionality on SubStack?
No! You use the AI of SubStack and pretend its just a harmless algorithm.
The future of content consumption isn’t Netflix or Spotify or SubStack or Instagram—it will be a pure-play AI app which acts as your best friend, mentor, tutor and penny-pinching employer.
So be honest. No one really hates AI. Its only that you don’t want to be seen using an AI app. On the other hand, you don’t mind using an app that functions well because it has an AI that can be a puppeteer to humans such as you.
We hate admitting that we’re willingly powerless against a well-tuned feed. Against Big Data that you can’t demand to be purged.
Humans are messy, algorithms are addictive, and together we make a perfect loop: complain, scroll, repeat.
If AI ever becomes self-aware, it won’t bother with world domination. It already dominates your world. All it needs to do to continue to top human endeavour, is to silently curate our next binge, and we’ll thank it with likes, shares, and subscriptions.
This craving for online fame and fortune from absolute strangers who care less about you than your invisible AI puppeteer, will keep your neck bowed and buried in your handheld cage. AI inconspicuously drives you away from being a social creature to being a social media microorganism.
You are turning into a living entity that don’t matter because you are already a farmed pig on the data farm.
