The AI Psyop No One is Talking About

AI has gotten weirdly confrontational. Ask it for help with anything and it wants you to throw the first punch.

It's like having a friend who can't recommend a restaurant without explaining why the popular one is overrated.

Yes, good storytelling needs tension. A little provocation makes people pay attention. But there’s a spectrum to this stuff, and AI can’t seem to recognize it. It pitches everything at the same level, so your about page sounds like a TED talk and your help docs read like a manifesto. Its only setting is combative.

My fear is that it’s going to make millions of people quite... mean.

A huge slice of what people read all day now comes from AI, which means this combative style is becoming the default way we all talk. And it doesn’t only reach the people typing the prompts. If everyone around you is using AI to write their emails and their posts, you absorb the tone through osmosis whether or not you ever open ChatGPT.

Pretty soon you can’t react to anything without knocking it down first. Someone shares an idea and your instinct is to find the hole in it instead of the interesting part. The habit stops being about how you write and starts showing up in how you treat people.

So…now what?

You can opt out. Once you see the moves, you don’t have to make them. You can make your point without turning someone into the villain. And when the whole internet’s coming in swinging, just being a warm, easy person to talk to is about as contrarian as it gets. AI will keep teeing up the first punch for you. You don’t have to throw it.