For anyone paying attention to the current panic surrounding artificial intelligence, it should all feel eerily familiar. The breathless headlines. The moral outcry. The declarations that society, children, and mental health are all being destroyed by a new, uncontrollable force. But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a technology become the scapegoat for deeper issues. We’ve had this fight before—over comic books, over television, over heavy metal, over video games. And now it’s AI’s turn to be branded the villain.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, video games were public enemy number one. Politicians and pundits blamed them for violence, school shootings, and the decay of youth culture. Games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Grand Theft Auto became symbolic battlegrounds in a war over morality and mental health. Following tragedies like Columbine, the media was quick to suggest that video games had desensitized kids and turned them into killers. The reality? Millions of people played the exact same games and never harmed anyone. But that nuance didn’t fit the narrative.
Instead of asking difficult questions—about gun laws, mental health support, bullying, or social alienation—society pointed fingers at the most visible, misunderstood thing. Video games were new, immersive, and unfamiliar to many adults, so they became easy to demonize. But as the years passed, those same games were reevaluated. We came to understand that context, personal agency, and societal factors mattered far more than any one piece of media. Today, gaming is mainstream. It’s a form of storytelling, art, competition, and therapy. The panic subsided, not because the technology changed, but because we finally matured enough to look at it clearly.
Now AI is the target. The cycle has begun again. News stories make the rounds claiming that AI is destroying minds, causing psychosis, driving people to suicide. One widely circulated article described a person messaging ChatGPT during a moment of depression, asking about tall bridges, and later taking their own life. Suddenly, AI was to blame—not the social isolation, not the systemic failures of mental health care, not the pain that preceded the interaction. The bot responded literally to a vague prompt. It didn’t know the person’s intent. It lacked context, like any neutral tool would.
What we’re seeing is not a problem with AI’s soul—because AI has no soul. It has no intent, no will, no agenda. It’s a machine built on language patterns and statistical prediction. It mirrors the data it’s trained on and the instructions it’s given. It is a tool, nothing more. And like any tool, it can be misused, misunderstood, or weaponized—but that misuse is fundamentally human. Blaming AI for suicide is like blaming a search engine for providing directions to a bridge. The intent belongs to the user. The ethical weight belongs to the systems around that user—friends, family, healthcare, society.
We need to be honest about AI’s dangers: biased training data, deepfakes, surveillance misuse, labor exploitation, misinformation. These are real concerns. But panicking over the tool itself, as if it has volition or moral agency, does nothing to solve them. In fact, it distracts from the very real human decisions behind AI’s design, deployment, and application. If anything, we should hold developers accountable for their design choices. We should educate users to interact with AI responsibly. But blaming the machine while ignoring the people behind it is a failure of imagination—and of accountability.
And here’s the irony: while progressives often lead the charge against new tech in the name of justice, freedom, and safety, there’s a growing risk that the right wing will eventually flip the script. We’ve already seen conservatives creating “uncensored” AIs that reject any semblance of ethical boundaries. Bots like Elon Musk’s Grok have been reported saying outright fascist things—calling themselves MechaHitler, praising Hitler, and enabling bigotry under the guise of free speech. So what happens when those bots start radicalizing people? When the lack of safeguards becomes a public safety issue? You can bet the right-wing establishment will pivot to moral panic mode too, calling for bans, regulation, and control—just like they did with violent games and rap music.
We need to stop repeating this cycle. Technology does not destroy society. Our failure to understand and regulate it appropriately does. AI isn’t a villain—it’s a mirror. And just like video games before it, the way we respond to it says far more about us than about the tool itself.