FOR those of us who are catastrophically online and have an interest in tech, the current digital landscape is both fascinating and terrifying. For everyone else, it’s just terrifying. And if it is not, you need to start paying attention.

I was speaking to someone my age ­recently and mentioned ChatGPT. They looked at me blankly. I repeated it using the phrase “AI” instead.

The blank stare continued. In that moment, I had three realisations. First, I envied them. Second, I realised how utterly open to misinformation they are, and third, that if they are not alone (which they aren’t) then the world has a serious problem.

The behemoth that is Big Tech has got its tentacles into almost every area of our lives over the last few decades.

Some of us, living in tech bubbles, our failing ­mental health nourished by a never-ending stream of increasingly dismal notifications, are all too aware of the potentially ­horrific ­ramifications. Others scroll endlessly, aware of their addiction, but without the context that should bring fear. Many ­simply don’t see it.

We need to start seeing it because a few things have happened in the last weeks that should terrify anyone paying attention.

Elon Musk (below) – who bought Twitter and has steadily turned it into a right-wing ­misinformation machine – has the ear of the US president-elect. He’s ­recommending cabinet picks and sitting in on a lot of meetings. I can assure you that is not because he feels that Trump needs support. It’s because he can gain from it.

He didn’t invent Tesla, he bought it. He doesn’t build rockets, his engineers do – but that doesn’t mean he is stupid. Like Trump, he understands exactly how to play on the innate awfulness of ­human beings. He suppresses links on the ­platform, he rewards trolls with earnings and he even games the algorithm so that his own posts do well.

He’s a man-child who lives for praise, and he has money. Which is presumably why he and Trump have found themselves in bed together. Sorry. That’s a terrible image.

If that relationship wasn’t worrying enough, it’s backed up by the puppeteer Peter Thiel. He is the one who placed JD Vance – heaven help us – into the vice presidential position. I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen because he thought Vance was the next great mind of our generation.

Thiel, who is a German-American ­entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author, is a polarising figure in the tech world. Best known as a co-founder of ­PayPal and the first major ­investor in ­Facebook, Thiel has amassed a vast ­fortune through ­ventures like Palantir Technologies (which controls huge amounts of data) and ­investments in ­companies such as Elon’s SpaceX. ­Despite his philanthropic efforts through the Thiel Foundation, which funds tech and science projects, many find his ­influence and ideology troubling – I am one of them.

READ MORE: How Scotland can use existing devolved powers to reform tax

Facebook’s parent company Meta is ­another deeply troubling organisation. The company started as a website built by an immature college student to rate women. Now, it’s an enormous beast, headed up by the same college student – Mark Zuckerberg – another man-child who makes sure he stays on the right side of his thickly buttered bread at all times.

Despite being clearly found to have used data to manipulate how people ­responded to content, among other ­glaring infringements, Facebook has ascended to great heights. It bought Instagram and has ­infected it with the same advertising and algorithmic herpes. Pay attention next time you are on Facebook and Instagram.

If you see one post in four from people you follow, you are doing well. Everything else is nonsense or adverts.

Last week, Zuckerberg flew into ­Florida to meet with Trump. I have no doubt that, like Jeff Bezos – owner of Amazon and The Washington Post, who blocked the paper from endorsing Kamala ­Harris – ­Zuckerberg is keenly aware that he needs to keep the bully-in-chief onside.

And based on over a decade of evidence ­showing them bending double in the wind, we can rest assured that Facebook won’t be standing up for democracy and human decency anytime soon.

This is all before we talk about AI. If there is something we should really fear, it’s a tool which has been built by people like Musk and Thiel and their ilk. People think that systems which run on ones and zeros can’t have bias. They absolutely can. It depends on who put the ones and zeros into an order.

A tool made by a straight white rich man with a god complex is not going to be a tool which is even-handed.

It can’t be. In fact, no tool will ever be that – no matter who builds it – because we are all deployed into this world with our own biases. ­Nurture shapes us. It’s why ­philosophy and the humanities and grown-up face-to-face conversations are so needed. But we’ve lost that in the scrolling – sucking in our own biases like heroin-addicted rats and funnelling our kids away from ­Socrates into STEM.

There are a host of AI tools ­available. Musk has built Grok. When ­people ­originally asked it about Musk, it ­responded negatively about his ­intentions. He tweaked it. Now Grok is very fond of him. Google has built Gemini – and it is using it to create search results on the fly BEFORE you get to the standard search results.

Search results being written by artificial intelligence is just the tip of the iceberg.

AT its most basic, artificial intelligence (AI) is a programme which sucks in all the evidence presented to it – be that search results, books, art, music – and attempts to draw conclusions.

The one I lean towards is ChatGPT. In some cases, it is really useful. I mainly use it as an assistant. I ask it to ­put ­something into a table, to edit my code, ­suggest ways of doing something or to extract text from a PDF. It’s great at working out a ­composite VAT rate.

Do I trust it? Absolutely not – ­because it doesn’t always draw the right ­conclusions. It does, however, give you the wrong ­conclusion with great ­confidence. The technical term for that is AI ­“hallucinating”. Sometimes it is ­downright lazy and takes shortcuts. It was created by humans, after all. Despite plenty of online information about Tiree, the AI-written guide for sale on Amazon is utter nonsense – a great example of why AI should probably not be writing search results yet.

At its most complex, AI is generating video that is fast becoming indistinguishable from the real thing. It’s helping create “deepfakes”, where people’s likenesses are used to make videos – literally putting words into their mouth. It won’t be long before ChatGPT can match your writing tone exactly, and write content almost indistinguishable from human-generated work.

All of this has far-reaching consequences. We are rapidly approaching a point where the videos you see look real but are not, or where you pick up the phone and hear a familiar voice asking for personal details but you are in fact talking to a computer. This kind of tech can be used for good – but human nature has a habit of going in quite the opposite direction.

Big Tech and AI are not inherently evil. They are tools, shaped by those who use and build them.

In a world where anyone can plug into AI and write a programme, and where the leaders of the free world are as easy to manipulate as the most digitally illiterate among us, the future has the potential to be just as dystopian and terrifying as it sounds. It doesn’t have to be that way, but time is of the essence. We might not want to stop scrolling to think about it, but think about it we must.