I remember the day in 2022 when the world discovered chatgpt & this euphoria swept across everyone’s faces.
At the time I was using Jasper.ai, writesonic, articleforge etc. and paying $20-$50 a month for GPT 2 copy for SEO projects…so I was more skeptical that they dropped a better faster version for free…than the whole “they’re takin our jerbs!” thing.
I wasn’t worried about that (and I’m still not worried) because I worked with them first hand and saw the predictable patterns (and the plagiarism, the P in GPT2 was for “paste”). The thing I kept running into when doing SEO articles was the lack of context. It would just fire off text about the first definition of the word it found, then lose track after 300 words, then garble.
Today, my OpenAI api key has had a great workout. I’ve built so many random things in Cursor (some useful, mostly broken). Used tools to generate those 2-15s video clips across models. Obviously, used self-hosted LLMs (Gemma 4 is indeed wild).
I keep trying the new products hoping to understand the euphoria. But I just spend so much more time fixing things than making anything useful. Sometimes it’s useful. …But anyone who is still imagining AI replacing humans en masse is, frankly, deluded.
The reason it’s delusional to think a human and AI have the same capacity is context windows, there are only so many tokens any model can keep in the window & reference at any time. Last I checked, the in-house models were at like 10M tokens before it starts garbling or repeating (maybe there’s more now) but the context is the bottleneck. Throwing more RAM and GPUs isn’t going to crest that context issue, neuromorphic & quantum are just going to progressively reveal that a computer is not a human.
I met a TV writer at a bar & he was pretty savvy but still fairly shaken by the idea of studios basically printing content. …And yeah, Big Bang Theory’s inevitable reboot is almost certainly going to be AI-generated.
Cheap commercial stuff is going to be AI.
Those are obviously the jobs that people rely on to put food on the table, the base hits that get you to home plate. We agreed that these jobs suck. He said “artists already don’t get paid enough”. …but I asked that TV writer, if the slop work is covered by AI, does that not free up budgets for better content?
True, the vast majority of people will not care about quality, many will stack profits…but if even a few are interested in human-made work, artists will have an unimpeachable premium on their art. I told him “There’s a world where you can charge whatever you want to produce work that you actually care about.”
I had an epiphany recently that I’m actually addicted to my job,
I love performance marketing and AI has completely screwed up the fun parts (catching a hot campaign intra-day and scaling, coming up with fire ad creative, finding a pocket of profitability after a deep data dive).
I’m also exceptionally good at my work, and many 3p attempts to automate my logic have demonstrated that what I do is more of an art than a science. AI can do all of those same things I can, but no matter how much compute you throw at it, AI can never do this work the way I can. It just takes too much context to anticipate the irrational nature of a human. And my best work is irrational AF.
If you watch AI write code you can see it drop entire segments in real time. It ends up missing the point no matter how many nested agents you put in. AI accelerates productivity when someone knows what they’re doing and serves as their own “context agent” to fill in the blanks and redirect when necessary. AI is great at exploding ideas …in every sense.
Euphoria can be justified, I see the vision. Profit to supply patronage, tools to give people the freedom to pursue their dreams and stop wasting time on work they don’t want to do. I think we’re at least two years away from being two years away from that. Right now, it’s time to wake up from the delusion and get to work building that world. We’re automating the things that get us to market but not the things that keep us there. Human expression is what keeps us engaged. Using AI to create a facsimile of human labor isn’t gonna work long term. Humans care about humans. AI images and AI music are novelties on their own but the real interest is in the humanity it represents. People pay for attention. Most people don’t care if the drive thru is AI, but they’ll pay a premium if there’s a human they like on the mic.
I’m euphoric about people getting paid more to do what they love…idk maybe that’s delusional.
