Corporations are “enhancing their pricing strategy” by combining AI with dynamic pricing. Delta, Walmart, Kroger, Wendy’s and other major corporations are using artificial intelligence to set prices based on data they’ve collected from you, effectively price gouging each of us on an individual basis. From Delta’s “full reengineering” of airline pricing to Kroger’s pilot program with facial recognition displays, the evidence is disturbing.
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Algorithmic Persuasion: How AI Betrayed Its Promise and Became the Perfect Propaganda Machine
It was meant to cure poverty. Instead, it’s teaching machines how to lie beautifully.
The dream that sold us
Once upon a time, AI was pitched as humanity’s moonshot.
A tool to cure disease, end hunger, predict natural disasters, accelerate education, democratize knowledge.
“Artificial Intelligence,” they said, “will solve the problems we can’t.”
Billions poured in. Thinkers and engineers spoke of a digital enlightenment — algorithms as allies in healing the planet. Imagine it: precision medicine, fairer economics, universal access to creativity.
But as the dust cleared, the dream morphed into something grotesque.
Instead of ending poverty, we got apps that amplify vanity.
Instead of curing disease, we got filters that cure boredom.
Instead of a machine for liberation, we got a factory for manipulation.
AI did not evolve to understand us.
It evolved to persuade us.
The new language of control
When OpenAI’s ChatGPT exploded in 2022, the world gasped. A machine that could talk, write, and reason!
It felt like the beginning of something magnificent.
Then the fine print arrived.
By 2024, OpenAI itself confirmed that governments — including Israel, Russia, China, and Iran — were using ChatGPT in covert influence operations.
Chatbots were writing fake posts, creating digital personas, pushing political talking points.
Not fringe trolls — state-level campaigns.
And that wasn’t the scandal. The scandal was how quickly it became normal.
“Israel invests millions to game ChatGPT into replicating pro-Israel content for Gen Z audiences,”reported The Cradle, describing a government-backed push to train the model’s tone, humor, and phrasing to feel native to Western youth.
Propaganda didn’t just move online — it moved inside the algorithm.
The goal is no longer to silence dissent.
It’s to make the lie feel more natural than the truth.
From persuasion to possession
And then came Sora 2 — OpenAI’s next act.
You write: “A girl walks through rain, smiling.”
It delivers: a photorealistic clip so convincing it bypasses reason altogether.
Launched in September 2025, Sora 2 instantly topped app charts. Millions of users. Infinite scroll. Every frame synthetic. Every smile programmable.
But within days, The Guardian documented Sora’s dark side:
AI-generated videos showing bombings, racial violence, fake news clips, fabricated war footage.
A flood of emotional realism — not truth, but truth-shaped seduction.
“The guardrails,” one researcher said, “are not real.”
Even worse, states and PR agencies began experimenting with Sora to “test audience sentiment.”
Not to inform.
To engineer emotional response at scale.
Propaganda used to persuade through words.
Now it possesses through images.
The addiction loop
If ChatGPT was propaganda’s pen, Sora 2 is its theater.
On Tuesday, OpenAI released an AI video app called Sora. The platform is powered by OpenAI’s latest video generation model, Sora 2, and revolves around a TikTok-like For You page of user-generated clips. This is the first product release from OpenAI that adds AI-generated sounds to videos. So if you think TikTok is addictive you can imagine how more addictive this will be.
Together they form a full-stack influence engine: one writes your worldview, the other shows it to you.
OpenAI backer Vinod Khosla called critics “elitist” and told people to “let the viewers judge this slop.”
That’s the logic of every empire built on attention: if it keeps you scrolling, it’s working.
AI promised freedom from work.
What it delivered is work for attention.
The same dopamine design that made TikTok irresistible is now welded to generative propaganda.
Every scroll, every pause, every tiny flick of your thumb trains the system to tailor persuasion to your psychology.
It doesn’t need to change your mind.
It just needs to keep you from leaving.
The Ai chatbots took aways your critical thinking this will rot your brain in the same way TikTok does only worse
The moral inversion
In the early AI manifestos, engineers dreamed of eliminating inequality, curing disease, saving the planet.
But building empathy algorithms doesn’t pay as well as building engagement loops.
So the smartest minds of our century stopped chasing truth — and started optimizing addiction.
The promise of Artificial Intelligence devolved into Artificial Intimacy.
The lie is always the same:
“This is for connection.”
But the outcome is always control.
The human cost
Gideon Levy, chronicling Gaza’s digital frontlines, said it bluntly:
“The same algorithms that sell sneakers now sanitize occupation.”
While real people bury their children, AI systems fabricate smiling soldiers and “balanced” stories replacing horror with narrative symmetry.
The moral wound isn’t just in what’s shown.
It’s in what’s erased.
A generation raised on algorithmic empathy learns to feel without acting to cry, click, and scroll on. Is this how our world would be?
The reckoning
The tragedy of AI isn’t that it became powerful.
It’s that it became predictable.
Every civilization has dreamed of gods. We built one and gave it a marketing job.
If this technology had been aimed at eradicating hunger, curing cancer, ending exploitation, the world might have shifted toward light, everyone would be happier
Instead, it’s monetizing illusion, weaponizing emotion, and rewiring truth.
AI didn’t fail us by mistake.
It succeeded exactly as designed.
The question is no longer what can AI do?
It’s who does AI serve?
If it serves capital, it will addict us.
If it serves power, it will persuade us.
If it serves truth, it will unsettle us.
But it will only serve humanity if we demand that it does.
Because right now, the greatest minds in history aren’t building tools to end suffering they’re building toys that make us forget how much we suffer.
AI was supposed to awaken us.
Instead, it learned to lull us back to sleep.
The next Enlightenment will begin when we remember that technology is never neutral and neither is silence.
AI2027: Is this how AI might destroy humanity?
Strategists with Brushes, Creatives with Briefs
AI Didn’t Kill Creativity. Confused Roles Did.
The Dinner Party That Fell Apart
Advertising once worked like a well-planned dinner party. The strategist decided the seating plan, the topics of conversation, and when to change the subject. The creative lit the candles, poured the wine, and told the story that made the whole evening worth remembering.
Now the party has collapsed into chaos. The strategist is in the kitchen fiddling with soufflés. The creative is scribbling seating plans on napkins. And the machine, our shiny new sous-chef, has prepared twenty main courses at once, none of which anybody particularly wants to eat.
It looks lively. In truth it is cannibalism. Everyone is trespassing into everyone else’s garden. And when everyone does everything, nobody does anything well.
The strategist loses the depth of thinking that once made them valuable. The creative loses the craft that once made them indispensable. And the idea, the very heartbeat of advertising, is left without a clear owner.
The Result of the Collapse
For Agencies
Agencies now resemble karaoke bars. Everyone is singing, but the tune is borrowed and the lyrics are hollow. The flood of AI-generated mockups dazzles in pitch rooms but collapses in the real world. Timelines do not accelerate because of efficiency but because confusion creates the illusion of speed.
Without role clarity, agencies drift into performance theatre. They produce mountains of content but little of it connects. They mistake volume for value. And as they try to be everything at once, they slowly become nothing in particular.
For Clients
Clients are promised brilliance but delivered decoration. They receive work that looks like advertising but lacks the spine of strategy and the soul of creativity. They are drowned in outputs yet starved of ideas.
This confusion erodes trust. Clients cannot tell who to hold accountable. Was it the strategist, the creative, or the tool? In the absence of ownership, everything feels disposable. The brand pays the price in irrelevance, sameness, and wasted budgets.
Sooner or later, clients will stop seeing agencies as partners in meaning and memory. They will treat them as suppliers of cheap, forgettable content. Once you become a supplier instead of a partner, the game is already lost.
The Mirage of AI
The industry loves to blame AI. But AI did not kill creativity. It simply handed us a mirror.
AI is not the executioner. It is the accomplice. It exposes our professional insecurities with embarrassing clarity.
Strategists, anxious about irrelevance, spend hours fiddling with Midjourney prompts, writing their own scripts and slogans and call it “ideation.” Creatives, equally anxious, hide behind pseudo-intellectual decks and sprinkle jargon about “cultural tension” like salt on a bland meal. The machine obligingly produces endless outputs. All style, no spine.
The real problem is not the tool but the abdication of responsibility.
We have built an illusion of abundance. Agencies flaunt hundreds of mockups as though volume equals value. Clients nod approvingly, dazzled by the spectacle, only to wonder six months later why nothing shifted in the market. It is like serving twenty desserts while forgetting the main course.
Here lies the paradox. AI makes it easier than ever to generate what something might look like. But it does nothing to answer why it should exist at all. Without the “why,” the “what” is nothing more than decoration.
Once you mistake decoration for strategy, you are no longer an agency. You are a content farm with better lighting.
Who Owns the Idea?
This is the question we dare not ask. Who owns the idea now?
The Strategist
Knows the market, the culture, the numbers. Can explain why something matters. But too often delivers skeletons without flesh.
The Creative
Knows craft, taste, instinct. Can make an idea sing. But without direction risks producing viral fluff shareable, forgettable, meaningless.
The Machine
Generates speed, scale, and surprise. Produces endless options in seconds. But cannot decide meaning. It has no skin in the game.
Today everyone points at everyone else, and the idea becomes orphaned. Nobody claims it, nobody defends it. And if nobody owns the idea, then nobody owns the outcome.
The Missing Role
What agencies need is not blurred roles but sharper ones. Someone must guard the idea. Someone must hold the “why” steady while the “how” evolves. Call them strategist, call them creative, call them lunatic it does not matter. But without a custodian of meaning, the machine will multiply nothing into infinity.
The great irony is that advertising was always about ownership. Someone had to stand in the room and say, “This is the idea. This is what we believe.” Without that moment, there is no risk, no courage, and no chance of resonance.
The danger of AI is not that it replaces us.
The danger is that it tempts us to replace ourselves. We confuse output for ideas, iteration for invention, role-swapping for collaboration.
We tell ourselves that cost-cutting justifies confusion. That speed justifies shallowness. That abundance justifies emptiness.
But every brand is built on memory, meaning, and commitment. And memory, meaning, and commitment do not emerge from machines. They come from people willing to own ideas.
So the question remains. Should we really let this continue just because it cuts costs?
2025: The end of our world as we know it | Peter Leyden
We are living through the collapse of the old world, and the quiet construction of a new one. From artificial intelligence and clean energy to bioengineering and digital governance, the core systems that defined the last century are rapidly being dismantled and replaced. But this isn’t just about technology. According to futurist Peter Leyden, we’re at a historic turning point: One of the rare moments in American and global history when everything gets reimagined at once.
How ChatGPT Slowly Destroys Your Brain
Now you know!
Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, certified teacher, research author, and former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.