When is it OK to use AI? | Techtonic with Mark Hurst on WFMU

Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly radio show from WFMU about technology, how it's affecting us, and what we can do about it.

When is it OK to use AI?

May 18, 2026

Trillion-dollar companies are begging us to use their AI chatbots. But AI leads to cognitive decline, psychosis, loss of job skills, widening inequality, greater surveillance, and vast environmental damage. Is it ever OK to use AI?

Show Notes

By Jen Sorensen

• Gary Marcus on the growing AI backlash (May 4, 2026):

Generative AI has been a net negative for society.

GenAI has been undermining secondary and college education, opening up mass surveillance, increasing disinformation, delusions, impersonation, phishing, and other forms of cybercrime, nonconsensual deep fake porn, bias in employment and other domains, and economic disparity, drowning the world in slop and unwanted, over-leveraged environment-damaging data centers that risk causing a recession.

Simultaneously it has empowered a bunch of people who want to privatize almost all the gains while leave all the downsides to society, taking almost zero responsibility.

I don’t think we are better off than we were four years ago.

• From AI and the danger of cognitive surrender (gift link, the Economist, Apr 30, 2026):

AI’s range of capabilities, allied to a convenient conversational interface and a seductively confident persona, raises the prospect less of delegation than of wholesale capitulation. Hence “cognitive surrender”, a term coined by Steven Shaw of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in a recent paper written with his colleague, Gideon Nave.

Messrs Shaw and Nave asked volunteers to answer demanding questions with the assistance of AI, and a little like Mr LaCour’s calculator experiment, randomly introduced errors into the machine’s answers. When the model gave accurate responses, the people using it outperformed a control group of people relying on their own brainpower. When the AI gave the wrong answers, the people using it did much worse than the control group. In other words, people stopped thinking for themselves.<br>“Delegation” is what we do when we use a calculator to do long division. Capitulation, or surrender, is when we stop thinking at all due to reliance on AI.

• On cognitive decline after repeated use of AI: AI Use Appears to Have a “Boiling Frog” Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns (Futurism, Apr 14, 2026).

In a new study, researchers claim to provide the first causal evidence that leaning on AI to assist with “reasoning-intensive” cognitive labor — mental tasks ranging from writing to studying to coding to simply brainstorming new ideas — can rapidly impair users’ intellectual ability and willingness to persist despite difficulty.

“We find that AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost,” the study declares of its findings. “After just [about] 10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it.”

• From Brian Merchant’s roundup of educators’ emails about AI (March 12, 2026):

I’m a lecturer in Psychology at a large private college in Dublin. At a recent meeting (zoom—of course!) our Data Analytics and Reporting manager asked what we all thought about getting AI to mark our students’ work, like long form essays. . . .

Obviously, students are using AI to write the assignments anyway. The idea that we can catch this kind of plagiarism effectively is pure fantasy. Increasingly my students genuinely do not understand why they should not use AI anyway... what is the point of ‘wasting’ days researching and writing an essay when the AI version will be as good or even better?

My question now is if AI is writing the work and AI is reading the work, do we even need to be there at all?

• From What A.I. Did to My College Class by Theo Baker a senior at Stanford (May 17, 2026):

A.I. has made deception easier and more remunerative than ever before.

Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college, yet the school was at first slow to realize how widespread this would become.

• Video: U. Central Florida commencement speaker getting booed (404 Media, May 11, 2026)

• Video: Eric Schmidt getting booed as the commencement speaker at the University of Arizona (May 17, 2026). See also the full clip.

--> On the comment about not asking what seat, just get on the rocketship: on Bluesky, alison writes: "no, you dipshit, before you get on you ask SAY, WHERE IS THIS ROCKETSHIP HEADED" . . . Brendel writes: "Smarmiest part of this is “when the rocketship comes you don’t ask which seat, you just get on” – that’s right, college graduates, the message from the University of Arizona is to stop asking questions about things" ... and from Tom: "When someone offers you a seat on the...