A Token for Your Thoughts

There is an unspoken issue right now flooding the internet. As AI does more and more of the heavy lifting, when we need information, no one seems to be talking about the huge money grab that it's causing. I am talking about tokens. Tokens are an imaginary currency, like Bitcoin, used to pay for generating AI content, asking whatever bot you prefer to use, and general AI usage. It feels like double taxation with few perks or benefits. I’ll tell you why.

Terrible Two’s

AI is an amazing tool. True. But it is not amazing yet. It’s in the terrible twos stage of its growth. It sometimes behaves. It sometimes answers truthfully. AI can be trusted sometimes. But most of the time, it is erratic and misleading, even outright deceptive, and prone to leading you on a wild-goose chase, which is aggravating, like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum.

As with children, we have to wait it out. At some point, the billions of bugs will be ironed out, and we will have a truly useful tool. Right now, we don’t, and it is far from reliable.

Moving with the Times

I use AI every day. No, not for my writing. I don’t believe writing should ever come from a machine that has no understanding of the human condition or of feelings and emotions beyond a textbook definition of the concepts. It will never feel or experience, so writing from a bot is generic and cold.

I use AI in art, but I don’t create art with it. My view on that is the same as I stated about writing. I use it to give my art a unique aspect. I animate my drawings. It’s art come to life. This is a great way to engage a population of humanity that doesn’t stop to look at art. They don’t contemplate it or its meaning. When I animate a drawing, the Reels surfers, the TikTok generation, and the attention-span-compromised masses actually stop and look at the art.

I have even animated other artists’ works for the collaborative I run once a month. That post received over 10,000 hits, whereas our normal collaboration posts get half that. Animating art is a powerful marketing tool. Even so, it can be excruciatingly frustrating and costly.

My Opinion and Why

AI, what can I say about it? I am not a fan. It’s being used by scammers who rob people of their savings. It is making it harder for businesses because of that issue, because media like Facebook now will not load any content that has any AI signature to it anymore. And anything you create with AI has the signature of the program you used. It’s in the code.

So now, if I want to post my logo, let’s say, with my writing posts or art posts that have been animated, I have to run all of my content through a multitude of steps to keep it from being flagged by the bot that censors content. Meta has enacted this within the last 36 hours. And let me say this. It adds a tremendous amount of time and energy to a routine that already takes up hours of my time. I spend over an hour posting my work, and now it will take me two or more hours as more and more platforms activate this kind of filter.

Even with all the issues regarding the filtering and censoring of content, it is not what makes me angriest about AI. What has me peeved is that we have a product that is purchased with no refunds for damaged, false, or outdated content.

Every AI out there gives incorrect information. You cannot rely on its accuracy in any way. The information it spews out is, most of the time, incorrect. I’ll give you an example.

Growing My Brand Using AI

I have been growing my brand. I am branching out, and as a result, I am creating websites and online stores for digital data, and trying to leverage the power of the internet to drive traffic to my sites to garner subscribers and clients. I am not tech-savvy in any way. I don’t enjoy it. I just want to be able to do a thing and click to give a command, so the bot slave does it. Lazy, I know, but I want to have a life and not sit at my terminal for 18 hours a day. I am seriously close to that amount of time.

In any event, I am using AI to get instructions on how to do this and that in that process. This is causing me problems. Every site now has its own bot attendant or helper. I think humans are already extinct. Anyway, the ability to ask it to tell you how to do something and get a process is useful and a cool superpower. That ability and the use of AI are uber expensive.

AI’s Vague Pricing

There are no free AI programs. If something is offered for free, you are limited to very basic content and lackluster graphics and information. If you need probative or high-definition content, which is dangled like a carrot before you, you will pay a price for it. A high price. You will be forced to subscribe to a service that provides AI.

I pay $35 a month for my AI servant. It serves me well most of the time with simple tasks, but if I ask it to tell me how to do something on a site, like changing content on a domain or website, it takes me on a circle jerk. Every AI does this, and in the same pattern.

The first few queries will seem fine, and then it all goes south. No AI has current, up-to-date information. That means that when you need to, let’s say, add something to a page on a platform, it will give you one wrong piece of information after another, along with incorrect procedures. When you tell it it is wrong and that the instructions do not result in what you need, it will apologize with apologies we know are not sincere, then give you other instructions that are also incorrect. It will continue to do this until you are either screaming and needing Xanax, or until it has used up your piggy bank of tokens. Yes, I know it is ridiculous to scream at a machine, but believe me, when you experience it, you will scream too.

There needs to be a whole classification for a psychological diagnosis of the psychosis and frustration created while using AI, by the way.

You see, even with a subscription to the AI, you are given a stipend. The number of tokens is often not disclosed to you. You are not told how many you have, how many you are using at any given time, or how many tokens are required to answer your query or create the content you are asking for. You have no clue until the screen lights up with, “You have run out of tokens. Come back next week.” Yes, you see that correctly. It can literally shut you out for days, a week, and who knows, maybe a month. Then you are hit with the offer to buy more tokens to continue. They have literally set up a system of forced purchasing, because no one is going to want to leave a task undone for a week, and “return after the commercial break,” so to speak. But that is not the thing that leaves me in a rage.

What makes me want to hurt something is that you blow through tokens at light speed. When you spend that time on the false information highway, spinning your wheels and still not getting from point A to point B, you are charged for all the false and wrong information, procedures, and answers. You have no recourse to get a refund for the tokens spent in this manner.

No Refund Policy

There is no human to contact. In fact, there is usually no way to reach anyone, since customer service is an AI bot these days. Guess what? You are out of tokens. This system is the biggest transfer of wealth to date. You are giving these corporations all of your money, making them richer, while your wallet is systematically drained for a poor-quality, hyped-up product that does not work as described. It’s like that amazing thing you purchased on Temu, only to receive a miniature paper origami version of the thing.

I demand a full refund for the misleading and incorrect information, but guess what? I won’t get it. I am poorer today because of AI. Put that in your cap and smoke it.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #ChatGPT

Published by Illumination on Medium. July 2026.

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