During my nearly thirty years in the principal’s office of a Prague school, I built the naïve illusion that parental creativity had exhausted all possible surprises. I survived crusades against trace amounts of gluten in school chalk and guerrilla warfare demanding the abolition of tomato sauce. But what’s happening today in the digital ether reduces our old-school battles to the level of a district amateur league.
Before we get to the newest virtual threats, let’s recall one biological incident that shook the very foundations of modern pedagogy: the deadly danger of school tablets. While we foolish educators were dealing with the digital divide, cyberbullying, or data protection, vigilant mothers on WhatsApp uncovered the real enemy. Lice! The glowing touchscreen is apparently a modern teleport for Pediculus capitis.
Their argument was airtight: the moment two unfortunate children bend over a shared screen to solve a math problem, the parasites receive the command for a mass airborne landing. The display allegedly charges them with static electricity; the little beasts bounce off the tempered glass and leap from head to head with the elegance of an Olympic gymnast. Who cares how we teach fractions when nits are crawling out of USB ports?
And into this intellectual stratosphere enters the newest phenomenon: AI‑generated ragebait. A viral affair in which a fictional furious mother in a fictional chat demands a school‑wide ban on cookies because she forbids them to her daughter, and other children must not tempt her with unhealthy sugar during recess. It’s a brilliant move in the war over sugar and bio‑nutrition. Like in chess, the algorithm cold‑bloodedly sacrifices the piece of common sense to deliver checkmate to human judgment. The mother doesn’t exist. The cookies aren’t in danger. It’s just synthetic bait for anger, designed by a machine to resonate perfectly with our inner Pavlovian dog.
When a human creates such targeted outrage, it still carries a certain twisted craftsmanship — especially in politics. A strategist must sit down, sweat, and figure out how to portray a political opponent as a hybrid of utter incompetence and absolute evil. They must carefully calibrate fear: whether by warning that the opposition will confiscate combustion engines, mandate the consumption of crickets, or steal people’s pensions. It’s crude manipulation, but you can still feel the sweat, pulse, and desperate effort to score political points.
But once you unleash artificial intelligence into the political ring, ragebait becomes a cold, highly optimised industrial fattening operation. No need for a marketer with a pen. Just feed a generative model a simple prompt: “Generate a series of fictional conversations and leaked documents that drive voters insane, destroy the credibility of candidate XY, and trigger absolute panic.” The machine spits it out in three seconds, without scruples and without blinking its silicon eye. AI has no conscience, no moral hangover. It simply calculates the equation for maximum civic hysteria.
While humans have limits, the algorithm knows exactly which combination of keywords, fabricated scandals, and synthetic evidence will boil our brains and make us share, like, and politically hate with foam at the mouth. And we bark on command.
As someone who trains teachers and deals with the pitfalls of AI in education, I watch this mass brain‑wash with chilling fascination. The real threat doesn’t sit on a tablet display or in the palm oil of an oat cookie. The real threat is our boundless willingness to get angry about something a silicon brain sucked out of ones and zeros.
Ah, the golden old days, when we had to invent our nonsense ourselves and fight for it face‑to‑face at parent‑teacher meetings. The subtitle of my book, Everyone Goes Crazy in Their Own Way, no longer applies in the era of generative AI. We no longer go crazy in our own way. We’ve gone mad exactly as the algorithm programs us.