Let’s Stay Human

There’s a creepy tweet going around by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recommending that parents feed their kids’ interests and schedules into ChatGPT so it can generate a daily custom-made bot podcast to listen to on their morning drive to school.

Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch posted the viral reply, “What if you just talked to your children?”

Which is a crazy thing to have to say. But here we are.

cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night:

connect your family calendars and explain your kids' interests.

every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid's soccer game that afternoon, one kid's upcoming birthday, some news, etc.

— Sam Altman (@sama) July 31, 2026

They’re trying to make us worse. These billionaire generative AI corporations reap profits by making us worse human beings.

They want us to become less human. Less connected. Less creative. Less capable. Less wise. Less intelligent. They want to atrophy our ability to speak, write, research, relate, draw, make music, and cultivate intimate connections with the most important people in our lives, and then sell those things back to us at the hands of some chatbot.

Their entire business model is built around turning us into a bunch of soup-brained narcissists who can’t manage our own lives and our own relationships, and then being the crutch that we use to compensate for that self-inflicted debilitation.

The product they are selling us is not the chatbot itself. The actual product they’re selling is freedom from cognitive and emotional discomfort. From the discomfort of learning new skills. From the discomfort of personal growth. From the discomfort of taking risks. From the discomfort of pushing past that intimidating blank page to get something written. From the discomfort of having to think about other people and consider their interests and feelings. From the discomfort of having to interact with other humans and maybe say the wrong thing sometimes. From the discomfort of leaping into the unknown.

But all the best things in life sit on the other side of discomfort. Love. Romance. Intimacy. Art. Creativity. Growth. Healing. Rising beyond our limitations. Liberating ourselves from the illusion of the ego. They all require us to push through discomfort to the treasure on the other side. An aversion to discomfort is an aversion to a fulfilling human life on this planet.

But that’s exactly what these chatbot companies are nudging people into. They’re encouraging us to spend our lives curled up in impotent little balls of emotional infancy and intellectual stagnation so that they can sell us machines which act as digital prostheses for the sacred parts of ourselves we have amputated.

We mustn’t let them do this to us. We must remain human. We must hold fast to all those precious aspects of our humanity they’re trying to extract and commodify.

So let’s stay human.

Let’s face our discomfort.

Let’s face our fears.

Let’s take that risk.

Let’s tell our crush we fancy them.

Let’s go in for that kiss.

Let’s get our hearts broken.

Let’s read that book.

Let’s write that poem.

Let’s learn to draw.

Let’s learn to surf.

Let’s learn the saxophone.

Let’s learn all sorts of new things.

Let’s learn about the people in our lives.

Let’s nurture our relationships.

Let’s heal our wounds.

Let’s become better people.

Let’s sink our toes deep into the earth and feel these wonderful terrestrial bodies of ours in each moment.

They’re trying to pull us away from our humanity, so we must plunge deeper into it.

As things get more and more dystopian, simply holding fast to your humanity becomes an act of rebellion.

Reading by Tim Foley:

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/lets-stay-human