Don’t ask AI for what you don’t deserve

When Austrian novelist Clemens J Setz wrote in The Guardian about the German fairy tale of the golden fish, he offered a warning that feels uncannily relevant to our digital age. His message was simple: do not ask AI for what you do not deserve. Like the fisherman’s wife who demanded ever greater gifts until the world collapsed around her, our unchecked desires risk turning abundance into emptiness.
The tale is familiar. A fisherman catches a golden fish that grants every wish. His wife, consumed by desire, asks first for wealth, then for power, then for the papacy itself. Finally, she demands to become a goddess. At that moment, the world unravels. The lesson is clear: excessive desire destroys meaning. Setz’s parable is not mere folklore-;- it is a mirror for our age of algorithms.
AI is not simply a tool. It is a new mythical force, reshaping collective imagination in ways that echo the power of ancient stories. If desire loses its resistance, if every wish is granted instantly, then meaning itself evaporates. Position, status, even dreams become hollow when stripped of struggle. What makes desire compelling is the obstacle it must overcome. Remove the obstacle, and desire collapses into consumption.
Setz warns that if anyone could easily become a pope, the appeal of the position would fade. Things only become desirable when they require resistance, hardship,´-or-sacrifice. The post-digital generation, raised on instant gratification, risks forgetting this truth. AI accelerates this trend, transforming desire into instant reward and stripping it of meaning.
By satisfying every desire, AI leaves us with a greater void. Myth has always taught us that treasure lies beyond obstacles, that stories gain value through hardship. Scheherazade’s tales in One Thousand and One Nights mattered because they resisted death each night. Sinbad’s adventures inspired because they confronted monsters and storms. Without resistance, there is no story, only consumption. Even symbolic and spiritual sites lose their prestige if AI turns them into wishes granted on demand, as the golden fish did for the fisherman’s wife.
The danger is not technical but existential. AI shortens the path, cuts the magical thread and offers us an end without a beginning. It promises power without effort, sanctity without sacrifice, dreams without struggle. But history reminds us: meaning is born only from resistance. Treasure left on the roadside is no longer treasure. Status available without effort is no longer status. Absolute abundance is not salvation but a kind of nothingness.
This is why the connection between myth and AI is not futile. Myth has always been humanity’s attempt to understand what transcends the-limit-s of the mind. Today, AI plays the same role: opening new spaces while raising existential concerns. We are living through a moment of re-mythologising the world, but with digital tools. Whoever controls imagination controls meaning. That is the true danger, and the true responsibility, of our digital age.
Setz’s article goes beyond the technical debate about AI. He uses the German fairy tale as a mirror to understand the coming transformations in the relationship between humans and technology. His basic idea is that AI is not just a tool, but a factor that reshapes human consciousness and changes the way we perceive ourselves and others. As Noam Chomsky and colleagues argued in their critique The False Promise, the idea that AI understands language as humans do is flawed. What matters is not machine cognition but the way machines change the language of storytelling itself.
Here lies the cultural challenge. The Arab imagination was shaped by One Thousand and One Nights just as the Western imagination was shaped by Germanic tales. These stories were never escapist fantasies. They were attempts to capture what transcends the mind. Shahryar would not have listened to Scheherazade if her stories had not resisted death every night. Sinbad would not have become a symbol of travel and adventure if he had not encountered monsters, seas and horrors. The essence of the story was not in reaching the treasure, but in the hardship that made the treasure valuable.
AI threatens to erase this essence. When it fulfils all desires without resistance, it erases the appeal of desire itself. Position, status, dreams, all lose their meaning when they become instant results without hardship. We have entered an era without scarcity, an era without appeal. The irony is that absolute abundance is not salvation, but a kind of nothingness. Machines promise us power without effort, sanctity without sacrifice, dreams without suffering. But they make us forget that meaning has always come from resistance, obstacles and scarcity.
Perhaps this is the new myth we have not yet learned to tell: that AI offers us an end without a beginning, a result without a struggle. It cuts the magical thread that has bound myth to our consciousness for centuries. The question is whether we still have the ability to dream when all dreams become achievable. If desire loses its resistance, imagination loses its meaning. And without imagination, humanity loses its story.

Rate the article
Bad	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Very good
Result : 100%							Participated in the vote : 1