It was mid-March 2020, and none of us knew what to expect. All around the world, people were starting to get sick and even die from the “novel coronavirus.” Broadway had shut down. So had the NBA. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson turned up positive on the set of a movie in Australia. From my window, I could see a cruise ship camped offshore, denied the ability to dock, as its passengers were sick, or possibly sick, and either way we did not want them. The memory I will hold forever in my mind’s eye is a line of cars in a desperate queue, waiting to get into Target. Hoping everything would not be gone from its shelves. Hoping it wasn’t too late.
That March, everything was happening quickly, but it hadn’t quite happened yet. We knew the world was about to change, but we did not know how. We lacked the tools to effectively measure what was going on all around us.
Those early days of uncertainty remind me a lot of where we are now with AI. The technology is clearly here, spreading everywhere, and it is not going away. But what will it do? What effect will it have on our society? Will it make life better, or worse? How will we know? What’s the plan? Who should I even believe about the various ways possible futures may pan out?
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We’re all sitting uncomfortably with AI right now. It’s coming from the top down. The CEOs of the big AI companies caution us that this technology may very well take all of our jobs. Or that if it doesn’t live up to that hype, it might just crash the economy instead.
Or maybe both things will happen.
It is a truism that investors hate uncertainty. Well! We are all investors in our own future. The promise of AI is so powerful, and so very compelling. Who among us is not in favor of curing all diseases? Who among us is not in favor of limitless clean energy or an end to the climate crisis? But right now, at least, the path immediately ahead of us looks far less appealing.
Data centers are running up our power bills and polluting our air. Robots are offering up lists of kill targets, and in some cases blowing people up on the other end of those lists. In professional conversations, it is increasingly impossible to tell if we are being over-reliant on AI or not using it enough. Slop overruns our phones and feeds. The language of social media—especially on that scourge LinkedIn—and blog posts and newsletters and even big-J journalism increasingly reads like an output from Claude. Our apps are all getting injections of AI, like it or not. Employers are shedding roles by the thousands in the name of AI efficiency. People are succumbing to its dark mirror and losing their grasp on reality. We’re told the next model is so powerful, and so potentially dangerous and terrifying, that we can’t even release it. Not yet. (But soon! Don’t worry, soon.)
It’s buying things while we sleep. It’s discovering the structure of proteins. It’s telling children to kill themselves. It’s telling children to kill themselves.
No wonder most people say AI makes them nervous.
Is this what we signed up for? Is today the day? Did the drones wake up? Did it achieve consciousness? Is it alive? (No. Not yet. Go back to bed.)
The 21st-century average American lies in bed staring at their phone. They should be sleeping. They should read a book. They should take a melatonin. Instead they are deep in conversation with a math equation. Talking for hours and ages to melted sand. A revelatory discussion. A tête-à-tête without end. Oh, you are a clever boy! A clever, clever boy. (Quick! Post it to LinkedIn!)
All our friends are AI now. And our lovers. And our business associates. The recruiter is AI. The salesman is AI. The journalist is AI. The musician, the artist, the therapist, the attorney. The coder, oh my god, the coder is definitely AI. The AI has learned to code. The AI is building itself.
Will I have a job tomorrow? Will the market crash? Why does OpenAI need a bunker? Do I need a bunker? Maybe I should have a bunker.
Watching Lego videos from a foreign adversary. Interacting with my research reports via AI podcasts. Running an agent on my Mac Mini, all day and all night. It never sleeps, it never stops. Always going. And what does it do? Shhhhh. Don’t ask me that. Anything but that.
And what will it mean to be a working artist in the age of AI? Look, look, I don’t mean Artist, artist. I’m not talking about the Whitney Biennial here. But let’s say you are one of the 265,000 or so graphic designers working in the United States. You’re not famous. You’re not on the walls of MoMA. But you’re making a living, doing what you love. What does AI mean for you?
Will your clients stick around, or just start prompting Nano Banana? Will AI become a tool you use in your production—just another Photoshop at the end of the day? Or will it—having scanned in every image you’ve ever made and your colleagues have ever made and everyone has ever made—just replace you and leave you unemployed and uncertain, for the price of a $20 per month subscription that includes 5 terabytes to store your email and online image slop?
That em dash! I used an em dash. Now I’m worried you think AI wrote this, not me. A reasonable suspicion, for who would be able to say, definitively, other than me? (Oh, but it wasn’t, I promise you!) It’s still embarrassing to admit you’ve used an AI to do what it was designed to do. Sort of like being on a GLP-1. No one wants to admit it, but why is everyone suddenly so skinny and so smart?
Except when they do admit it! And then you feel you’ve fallen behind. Oh god, I can’t even get my ClawdBot to do anything useful at all, even though it’s doing it all the time. But look at everyone else, and their productivity! Their agents must be excellent. I envy them all. I must do more, experiment more.
(I tried, reader, I tried.) I fed my work to Gemini and asked it to give it a go for me, on this very essay. At first, I thought it was awful. But then I realized: What if I am the one who is awful? What if it has accurately captured my voice? What if I’m just like that? Purple and overly self-referential. Claude was no better.
Or, on the other hand, maybe the AI is not bad. Maybe I’m just too stupid to properly train it. A comforting thought, until it is not.
Are you familiar with Angine de Poitrine? (Maybe not, if your For You page doesn’t look like mine.) They are a freaky-looking experimental math-rock duo that plays weird microtonal art music. Right now, they are everywhere all at once. Viral. I read a story recently arguing that part of their appeal is that they are the antidote to AI, a band too original and too weird to be the product of a large language model. Proof that the flattening of creativity one gets from generative AI outputs means it will never catch up with human artistry and, well, weirdness. (This is also why the AI bros love to repeat the argument that taste is all that matters in an endless mimicry.)
But of course, Angine de Poitrine tastes a lot like licorice. And the implication, if the argument is correct, is that to stand out from the AI-generated pack we will need to become so weird and unexpected as to be off-putting to most people in order to have some other different subset truly love us. Hence what you have just read. Hence what you are reading.
How can you QuitGPT when it is already everything? How can you stand in front of the inevitable everywhere and block its path? Telling people to avoid using generative AI is increasingly telling them they must avoid taking part in society. We have tried that before.
As the novel coronavirus became covid-19 and eventually just plain covid, we learned a lot about it. We learned what to expect. We built tools that helped us track, and prevent, its spread. We created vaccines. And in time, we reopened the schools. We reopened life.
We have not really begun to make this progress with AI. Why, for example, is this dashboard not found on a government website? Where is the large-scale industrial policy for transforming our grid to support massive data center build-outs? Where is the plan for what happens when millions of people—software engineers, paralegals, truck drivers, translators, journalists, janitors—are suddenly out of work?
We need tools to better understand what’s coming, how it is spreading, how it is changing things. We need to be able to see its actual effect on the economy, rather than the fumbling rough sense we have now. Until we can track it, understand it, and predict it, we will be left with uncertainty and malaise, bleaching our broccoli in a cloth mask.
