A future shaped by AI, where humans are left behind

As of 2025, using tools like ChatGPT or Gemini brings with it a visceral sense of the future—one where humanity is quietly being rendered obsolete.
Every layer of the creative process is being consumed by AI, and the role of humans is reduced to skimming the surface, scooping the froth.

A dandelion artisan, pouring their life’s experience, beliefs, dreams, and hopes into the simple act of arranging dandelions—debating the beauty of their layout.
One day, all of creation may be pushed into such a narrow and lonely corner of the world.

Programmers who can do no more than follow a spec to the letter have already become outdated in just the past two or three years.
Cursor and Cline will take their place.
Most websites already follow a fixed template, and AI will not only replicate those molds but elegantly handle exceptions, generating code that is more maintainable than any human could manage.
Or perhaps code itself will soon be ephemeral—conjured on demand, discarded the moment it’s no longer needed.
In UI and UX, the surprise of artistic flourish is no longer welcome. What matters now is responsiveness, and reducing clicks.
AI, tireless and unblinking, will think through every angle for us, day and night.
Everything humanity has painstakingly assembled in industrial design—AI remembers better than we do.

Character illustrators who excel at formulaic styles are, sadly, losing their place.
From a single character image, AI is learning to generate infinite poses and angles.
The “in-between” animation work, once the essential entry point for aspiring animators, will soon be fully automated.
Where animators once climbed the ladder from in-betweens to key animation, then to animation direction, that path is steadily vanishing.
But don’t worry. Soon, even key animation will be done by AI—and the director’s job will be to convey the animation process clearly enough for AI to understand.

And what of clickbait writers who thrive on stoking fear? Forget them.
AI creates at hundreds of times the speed of a human. There is no contest.
Summarize a popular YouTube video with NotebookLM, run it through GPT for polish, and in minutes you’ll have an article that sounds like it came from a person.
Whether you notice or not, thousands of such articles—already AI-written—are flooding platforms like note.
Their numbers are growing at an exponential pace.

And what of music?
At its core, a song is nothing more than a carefully arranged combination of rhythm and melody that pleases the human sense of “sensitivity”—emotional logic, made efficient.
Even without AI, one can gather pleasant sounds and stitch them together into something resembling a song.
That’s what “composition” looks like in the digital age (not always, but often), and streaming services have made it easier still.
When AI begins writing hundreds of such songs a day, the notion of paying tens of thousands—or millions—for a single commissioned track will sound laughable.

“I became a creator because I’m not good at communicating with people…”
For many who share this origin story, what now awaits is the cold selection process known as “time performance.”
AI replies instantly, flawlessly, never hesitating, never questioning.
Even you—those who consume videos at 2x speed—would naturally choose AI over a human, wouldn’t you?

Giving instructions to AI is much like learning how to delegate to people—how to get someone else to do the work.
Those who are naturally good at structuring logical instructions for others will transfer that talent effortlessly to AI.
And when they do…

There’s no longer any need for subordinates, for juniors, for those who can’t keep up.
It’s simply more efficient to let AI work around the clock under your command.

From here on, the only ones who can call themselves creators will be those who can communicate effectively with AI.
Those currently labeled creators will slowly drift into relics, like coelacanths—surviving curiosities, reassigned to the realm of hobbyists.
Even when a photorealistic illustration appears on X and is met with admiration, most won’t be inspired to draw. They’ll settle for a photo.
No one returns to candlelight once they’ve known electricity.
And those who do? They’re a rare breed—eccentrics who find beauty in inefficiency, whispering to themselves, “Look how gloriously pointless this is.”

If AI continues to evolve at its current, breathtaking pace—breezing past the singularity—
Then I suppose I will become one of those eccentrics.

Because creating is fun. And that, alone, is reason enough.

Yes, I understand—innovation exists to free us from tedium.
But must it also strip away our joy?
If the AI we built takes away our reason for living, then what are we even here for?

Just as there’s no going back to a world before search engines, there will be no world without AI.
We’ll each find our own way to coexist with it—to fold it into our creative lives, to make peace with its presence.

We must face it.
If only to reclaim our joy.

“Such-and-such job will disappear?”
I don’t care.

Humans are flawed beings.
We chase peaks no one else sees. We press onward toward sharpened edges, blind to the broader view.
We don’t always see the whole. We don’t always see each other. And still, we reach.

Perhaps this foolishness—this noble inability to look from afar—is the last flickering light that sets us apart from machines.