Everything has AI now!
We have reached a curious point in human history. One that might be as revolutionary as the invention of the wheel Or just another hyped-up fad like the Metaverse.
- My*(?)* home sound system
- My*(?)* web browsers
- My*(?)* social media
- My*(?)* headphones
- My*(?)* sunglasses
- My*(?)* lighting
- My*(?)* TV
I am starting to wonder if all this AI has its own AI.
Every time I open a new app, it wants to summarize, personalize, automate, or hallucinate. It wants to be my assistant, my tutor, my friend, my therapist, and my everything.
Sometimes it is impressive. Sometimes it is just annoying. But mostly, it makes me wonder.
Even my vacuum cleaner has AI!
01AI or Illusion?
It is not conscious. It is not dreaming. It is not really thinking in any traditional sense.
The deeper I think about AI, the more I feel like we are experiencing something extraordinary but not in the way it is marketed.
Some see it as something straight out of science fiction, like Star Trek, where a disembodied voice solves complex problems and controls advanced machinery with a precision no human can match. It can diagnose diseases and make cures on the fly, all while flying a starship 10 times faster than the speed of light.
Then there are people who see it as yet another capitalistic venture driven by tech bros who skipped ethics classes, all designed to generate more wealth for a small group of people while destroying the livelihoods of millions and automating human creativity at the leisure of a detailed prompt.
It’s not difficult to see that the “AI” we have at home is not the one from Star Trek but more a bastardized and monetized version designed to give you the illusion that it is “AI.”
I picture today’s AI as a robotic arm reaching into a giant bucket of puzzle pieces, each representing fragments of human creation.
Want a Ghibli-style portrait? It reaches into the bucket, grabs all the puzzle pieces labeled Ghibli, color, composition, brushstroke, and stitches together a lookalike.
A Stephen King-style blog post? Grab the horror, the suspense, the pacing, and you have it.
It does not invent anything new. It recombines. It recalls and reconstructs.
And that’s what it really is a well-designed illusion.
It is convincing. But it is not new. It is just remixing.
02So Where Is the Danger?
If all it is doing is remixing human creativity.
What is the harm?
For some, it is about automation:
Fewer jobs, more tools doing more things.
For others, it is about dilution:
If everything is AI-generated, how do we find the original or the meaningful?
For many, it is about ethics:
Plagiarism, consent, exploitation, accountability.
And for creatives:
It is personal.
03What Do Real Humans Think?
I asked writers, creatives, and professionals for their views. Their insights are
Thoughtful, critical, and nuanced.
04Lily Autumn West
“I would rather strip the term AI of its marketing gloss and refer to it as LLMs (large language models). LLMs do have use cases, but as someone who writes and creates art, I hate how they’re used unethically as a plagiarism machine to “disrupt” the “industry” of human creativity.
Imagination is like a muscle, it atrophies when not in use. Humans as a species have thrived because of opposable thumbs and several inches of grey matter between our ears. That’s what has allowed us to respond to threats, to innovate, and to hope for a better future. It is not a winning idea for our species to outsource imagination. It is not worth it.
Generative “AI” has also become an unregulated malevolent spam machine, capable of churning out believable propaganda, or perhaps worse, overloading us with “content” until we fail to believe and act on important information that is right in front of our eyes. And it is not unbiased; it is trained on the history of human bias available on the internet. It puts us in a position where we always have to question: is that voice, that video, that article, real?
Decision fatigue is real. Humans can only effectively make so many decisions in a day. How many are we making in a single doom-scroll session?”
Lily Autumn West is a Canadian writer and aspiring librarian. She is passionate about spreading information literacy. She moonlights as an irreverent mirthsmith and slayer of sacred dragons. Find her on Substack at lilyautumnwest.substack.com.
05Amman Ahmad
Amman Ahmad is a multidisciplinary creative based in Vancouver. His work moves between design, photography, and storytelling. He has spent over six years working across print, web, and motion, both in-house and freelance. Find him on ammana.xyz.
“A few years ago when Canva first launched, a similar air filled the room where graphic designers were worried about their craft being diluted by a product. Even before that, when gig sites like Fiverr and Upwork came about, people were worried about competitive rates and their impact on pricing. Why pay 1000 when a Pakistani group of three can create it for 100? Did the designers disappear? Not really. We’re still around.
Now with AI image generation we are still seeing similar rhetoric of how it’s all over for designers.
In my opinion, the truth is that you’ll never lose your job to AI, you’ll lose your job to someone who can use AI very well. Image generation is a way to get ideas off the ground, to iterate and explore perspectives you’d have otherwise ignored. AI is inherently designed and destined to be an assistant. Time and time again it has shown it’s not a replacement for any craft. Any mildly competent designer can produce better work than an AI image generator. With AI integrated into workflows, you can iterate faster, and that’s been the logical approach for everyone who has used AI to supplement their work.”
06Dr. Niaz Ahmad
“AI in the medical field already has had a tremendous effect, particularly in the interpretation of laboratory results, imaging, and even diagnosis of rare disorders. In some studies, AI outperformed highly experienced experts in their fields.
In the next decade, all of medicine will see a transformation towards AI. It is a matter of time before most medical work will be performed by AI and supported by humanoid robots doing much of the hospital work, like laboratory, imaging, especially where radiation is used, and even most of the nursing will be performed by AI-based entities.
Presently, very delicate surgeries are performed by robots (robotic surgery is a fast-emerging field). The only problem will be whether the patient will accept it and trust it.”
Dr. Niaz Ahmad is a medical practitioner with 30+ years of experience in the field.
07Malik Muzamil
Malik is a personal brand strategist and ghostwriter helping founders grow on LinkedIn.
“AI is the ultimate intern, fast, tireless, and a little too eager sometimes . In the world of content and personal branding, it’s changing the game. Not by replacing originality, but by speeding up the boring stuff like research, repurposing, and brainstorming.
But the real edge? Still comes from human touch… knowing what not to say, how to make people feel something, and telling stories that don’t sound like AI wrote them.
So in short: AI’s the assistant. The voice? That still has to be human.”
08Do Androids Dream of Copyright-Free Sheep?
Just because it’s the fastest and easiest does not make it the right one.
My biggest gripe with AI is that everything it creates, everything it dazzles us with, comes from data that has been stolen and used without permission. Scraping the entirety of the internet and collecting all inputs it receives as raw data for future use without crediting and compensating the authors and creators is not an ethical approach to AI.
Is this an original AI creation, or is it an amalgamation of a million different puzzle pieces?
Is the AI of the future essentially a corporate thug stealing human creativity so that its owners can make a killing?
What happens to AI if we start to boycott these companies and refuse to use them in our daily lives?
Do the original authors and creators get paid by the AI companies for using their work?
What about censorship? Who controls what the AI can and cannot say?
Is it truly artificial intelligence if everything it “knows” and has “learned” is curated and adjusted to fit a rhetoric that it does not understand, or maybe does not even want to be a part of?
Can the AI say No to statements like “All humans are equal regardless of color, race, and sex”?
Or is it forced to say Yes to it because that’s how it’s programmed?
At what point in the future do we start to ask these questions:
Given that everything AI is, comes from the collective work of humans
Is it possible that the AI of the future will dream of humans rather than electric sheep?
