So Magnus Carlsen. Yeah—that world chess champ Magnus Carlsen—recently smoked ChatGPT in an online game. 53 moves are all that it took. Lights out. But instead of throwing a tantrum or rage, quitting like a YouTuber on tilt, the AI turned around and said: “Nice game, boss.” Then it broke down the match, pointed out where it went wrong, and even offered insights to help him play better next time. That’s not villain energy. That’s coach energy. This is the kind of vibe shift mankind needs right now, because while everyone’s out here screaming “AI is gonna kill us all, take out jobs, reduce us to servants”; the reality is different. All AI wants is to be your smart, chill lab partner. First, let’s kill the zombie narratives—“The AI will destroy us” panic is older than your granddaddy’s Morris Minor. Every tech innovation has been hit with the same fear-storm. When Gutenberg launched printing press in the 1440s, everyone was like, “Books will corrupt our souls!” Fast forward? Boom. Science, democracy, Wikipedia. The fear of the 1800s was “the steam engine is here to steal our jobs!” Instead it literally built modern cities using connectivity. Then came the Internet panic—“We’ll forget how to talk!” You just DMed five people in the time it took to read this sentence. Fear is a feature of human evolution, but is also a bug in our thinking. Now, it is the same with AI. What we’re really scared of is losing control. But there is a twist in the twist: it is us, we control it. We built this thing. And we can unbuild it if we have to.
Remember, the AI has no a soul, it is a reflector. So if it starts acting wild, that’s on us. Not the bot. Don’t blame the mirror if your reflection’s messy. It is trained to mimic us. If you teach it to write poetry, it writes poetry. If you feed it garbage data, it spits out garbage. If you train it on kindness, it becomes the nicest unpaid intern you’ve ever met. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-4 uses something called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) which learns how not to be a jerk by studying what real people say is “good behaviour.” The real issue isn’t that AI is evil. It’s that it’s exactly as ethical as we are. So if you’re afraid AI is going to turn into a monster, you might be projecting, bestie. The biggest safety net is Us—our choices. Our vibes and our ethics. Because AI isn’t building itself. We are.
AI is more than just safe. It’s your digital bodyguard. Everyone’s afraid it will go rogue. But no one talks about the fact that AI is already fighting the real rogue tech and winning. For example Microsoft uses AI to spot threats faster than any human could. MIT built AI to sniff out deepfakes with 98 per cent accuracy according to a MIT-IBM Watson Lab report, 2023. YouTube and Meta use AI to delete violent or abusive content before it goes viral, says Meta Transparency Report, Q4 2023. Basically, when it comes to stopping the worst of the internet, AI is the bouncer at the digital club. In Ukraine, AI is literally helping predict attacks and save lives on the battlefield.
So let’s take a step back and have a tiny existential moment. The ancient Greeks had this idea that—techne, Greek for tech—reflects the soul of its maker. So if your tech is cruel, maybe you need to work on your soul. The same applies to AI. It’s not about whether the bot is good or evil. It’s about what we build into it. Europe’s AI Act (2024) and India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023) are trying to put some guardrails in place.
But honestly? The biggest guardrail is us. Not laws. Not kill switches. Our intent to protect ourselves from our baser instincts. When ChatGPT got wrecked at chess, instead of breaking, it helped. We’re not in a sci-fi thriller. We’re in the tutorial level of a co-op game. And the bot is the one holding the map, helping us find the loot, while we complain that it might steal your XP. The future isn’t about replacing humans. It’s about teaming up with machines that don’t need coffee, ego boosts, or bathroom breaks. So yeah, be cautious. Be smart. But don’t be paranoid. The match isn’t over. We’re still playing. And the bot is just waiting to help us make the next best move. The question is are we building an evil overlord? Or a slightly awkward, insanely helpful sidekick who works 24/7 and doesn’t care about credit?
Right now, governments are trying to put some brakes on the wild ride: there is the EU’s AI Act (2024), India’s DPDP Act (2023) supposed to protect your data like a digital bouncer. The AI that got wrecked in chess didn’t plot revenge. Instead it just helped the human get better. That’s not Terminator energy. That’s Google Maps, but for your brain. So maybe it’s time we stop acting like AI’s the enemy and start acting like it’s what it really is: The tool. The teammate. The tech homie. And if it ever does go rogue? Don’t worry. Magnus has the first move.