Tens of thousands of white-collar workers might be spending this holiday season hunting for jobs, thanks to the rise in artificial intelligence. But the massive industry’s impact on Americans can be felt far outside of the workplace.
President Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to roll out the red carpet for AI corporations has deepened the concern about how this will hurt people around the world. Across the board, people agree that AI will do more harm than good.
But as the job market cools and the Trump administration pushes to make the United States the “AI capital of the world,” there are many more issues unfolding in the future of AI.
Creativity slumps
The content created by AI doesn’t come out of nowhere. In order to make the slop that’s haunting our social media feeds, AI programs need to learn from preexisting content—meaning that are often blatantly ripping off artists and musicians to recreate lifeless versions of what was already made.
Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli
In March, artwork imitating Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki began circulating online. With ChatGPT, people could make their own artwork in a nearly identical style. And more recently, artists like Paul McCartney and Max Richter have joined a protest against AI in the creative industry.
“The government’s proposals would impoverish creators, favoring those automating creativity over the people who compose our music, write our literature, paint our art,” Richter said in a statement obtained by The Guardian.
And he’s not wrong. Over the summer, an AI-generated band garnered more than 1 million streams of one of its songs.
Critical thinking plummets
Programs like ChatGPT and Gemini may be coming for our minds.
In a recent MIT Media Lab study, people aged 18 to 39 were instructed to write several SAT essays. Some people were given the option to use AI, while others either had the option of using Google’s search engine or nothing at all. Ultimately, those who used AI were found to have the lowest brain activity.
“[AI] users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels,” the study found.
And with AI being implemented in schools, the line between cheating and assisting is constantly being blurred. But it’s not just in educational spaces.
The way everyday people obtain information has also shifted. Instead of libraries or even searching through online databases or journalistic resources, programs like ChatGPT neatly compile information.
In a July Pew Research Center study, internet users conducting Google searches with the help of the company’s AI Overviews tool almost never clicked on the links that were cited and instead simply read what AI spat out at them and moved on.
Mental health takes a nosedive
ChatGPT has taken on many roles—including that of therapist.
A teenager looks through their ChatGPT history in a coffee shop on July 15.
According to a peer-reviewed paper from researchers at Sentio University and the University of Illinois of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, approximately 48% of people who reported mental health challenges used AI for support.
Despite benefits it may provide to some, the dark sides to AI’s unregulated chatbots have already claimed some lives. Reports of AI-assisted suicide have continued to pop up across the United States.
But as concerns grow, Trump has given a golden ticket to AI billionaires—even as their products boost suicidal ideation among already vulnerable populations.
Workers lose out
Trump has proudly worn “America first” on his sleeve for quite some time, bragging about how his brazen tariffs will bring money back to Americans and how freezing critical foreign aid will divert more funds to the United States.
But his “America first” approach seems to fall apart when it comes to AI replacing U.S. workers. Amazon has already laid off 14,000 people, and Duolingo laid off 10% of its contract employees.
But the people expected to suffer the most are those new to the workforce. A recent survey found that 62% of UK employers expect that entry-level positions—in addition to clerical, managerial, and administrative roles—will likely be replaced with AI.
And in the United States, this is already taking hold, with AI-generated workers having their own emails and employee IDs.
In Trump’s America, the only people he’s putting “first” are his fellow billionaires.
