Stop defending AI like it’s still in beta

I keep seeing people jump in to defend AI with something along the lines of: “it’s early tech”, How long does something get to be “early” for? This stuff has been around for years now, and it’s not hidden away in some lab. It’s being pushed into everything. Phones, operating systems, search, work tools. People are being told to use it. And the problem isn’t that it makes mistakes. Everything does. The problem is it makes things up, says them confidently, and most people have no reason to question it. The average person isn’t thinking “better fact check this AI response.” Why would they? It sounds like it knows what it’s talking about. That’s the whole selling point. So people just trust it. And half the time they won’t even realise they’ve been given wrong information. Then when you point this out, there’s always someone saying “well you should verify it.” Why? If a tool needs you to already know when it’s wrong in order to use it safely, that’s not a user problem. And it’s definitely not an “education issue.” If you need to be trained not to trust something that presents itself as knowledgeable, maybe it shouldn’t be rolled out to the general public yet. No one would accept this from anything else. Imagine a sat nav that just sends you to random places rather than where you needed to go. Or a calculator that occasionally guesses. People wouldn’t defend that, they’d stop using it. But with AI, people bend over backwards to excuse it. At some point you’ve got to stop treating it like a cool experiment and start judging it like the product it’s being sold as. Because right now it’s being pushed everywhere as something you can rely on… when you very clearly can’t.