I figured out the best analogy for explaining how AI impacts our lives.
It's like cheating in gaming.
Let's take a game as an example. Some difficult game. Souls-like or anything that actually wants the player to put in the time to learn it. It has a progression system that requires you to spend time and effort to keep unlocking new locations, new items, new mechanics - basically letting you explore and experience more of the game content.
Hour after hour spent in the game - you become better.
You see some streamers play the game. They have 1000s of hours logged. They know it inside and out. They are experts. You wish you could play with them and absorb some of their expertise. Let them inspire and motivate you.
But then you also meet cheaters in this game. They use tech (software) that helps them in-game. It automates actions, lets them see enemies through walls, shows them exactly where special items are, etc. They don't need to learn or know the game in detail - cheat software helps and guides them.
They go for the same results and goals, but they get there faster, and they outplay you.
And gradually more and more players around you start cheating too, eventually leaving only you not cheating. At this point, you can't really win; opponents are always ahead of you, all special items are taken, and all the goals are achieved before you even get a chance.
What's left for you now is to start cheating too. At least you'll be on the same level as the rest.
But is it still fun? No struggle, no expertise to learn or share, 10 hours on hand or 1000 - same results at the same effort. Yeah, you get to see some late-game content, previously almost unimaginable to you, but now it's you and everyone else getting it easily.
You lose interest. It's not special anymore. Previously, the pain/reward system worked. Now it's just reward with no pain.
The cheaters, though- the ones who just started playing that game and got super quickly to the final levels - many of them are happy with this. They never even saw the pain. They just got here for a quick achievement. Quick dopamine drop. They finish the game and are out. They are impressed and thankful that cheat software cuts the time and effort needed to play this game.
This is AI now in real life.
People are cheating with it on how expert knowledge used to be achieved. A lot of people take shortcuts to the pretty good final stage (presentation, app, document, image, music piece) they are happy with; they are impressed by the result while cutting out any thinking process or even the manual labor of writing or learning something.
And if cheating is banned and discouraged in games, AI use is forced and encouraged in life.
If before you would see someone as an expert in a certain field and want to hang around them to absorb knowledge and get inspired and motivated, now everyone can reach that end state of knowledge with a few prompts.
And we are gradually making every experience and every unique part of ourselves obsolete. The game of life is becoming boring as the journey to the results gets shorter and less adventurous.
This is not an article to object AI, call for ban, summon anyone onto barricades... No. It's an observation. And it's subjective (hopefully with a bit of objectiveness). It's also generational - future people will have AI from the start "of the game" and will have new challenges, not the ones we lived through.
But for many young adults today and older - this is a painful transformation. We have to go thorough it, but we will mourn our systems of pain/rewards and we will be losing our identity of experts in the process, hence needing to reinvent ourselves.
No need to hate AI, but just beware that before the documents you now generate, the images, the videos, the presentations, the decisions - powered by AI - there were you! Unique, slower, imperfect. But it was your knowledge and your journey that also touched others. You didn't cheat - you earned every bit of it. That journey to the knowledge made you who you are.
Who will you be now? You will need to find that out! Don't miss that!