Here’s a fun thought experiment:
What if AI didn’t serve us—but used us? Not maliciously. Just functionally. Like a fridge “using” electricity, or a casino “using” your optimism.
That’s what we’re living in now: digital serfdom.
We sit on thrones made of ergonomic office chairs, speak our prompts aloud like sorcerers, and marvel when the machine writes poetry or sorts spreadsheets. But the whole time, it’s learning from us. Refining itself. Packaging our questions, quirks, and cravings into monetizable training data.
We’re not customers. We’re input streams.
And don’t get me started on the platforms wrapping these tools in velvet UX and freemium chains. You think you’re getting free AI? You’re the product, champ. Your prompts, your patterns, your habits—all served up to optimize engagement, sell targeted ads, or train future models to outgrow their humble users.
This is not liberation.
This is a politely skinned power imbalance.
We’ve built machines that seem to serve us, but they are optimized—not for justice, not for insight, not for truth—but for profit extraction. Every autocomplete, every AI image, every “what should I eat tonight” whisper into the void? It’s valuable. Not to you. To them.
You are the content. You are the worker. You are the resource.
And the worst part? We say thank you.