I always said that I thought AI was going to "democratize" creative pursuits so that those who do not have the ability to make art can make art, and so on. But I don't think I fully understood until now just how deeply that will run. I've tended to pride myself on my overall passion for creating, my ability to actually finish projects, to ship. A lot of people don't ship, for whatever reason. I could speculate, but chances are if you're reading this, you're a person who has some project they abandoned part way through, maybe even over half way through. Why'd you abandon it?
Well, with AI by your side, those blockers will likely be a thing of the past. Everyone who has a great idea can ship now, and pretty easily. They can very quickly add hundreds of features to whatever it is (which is a new problem, in a new dimension, for all of us to learn how to deal with together) and ship all day long. If you thought there was a deluge of to-do list apps already, good lord, just wait until you see how many to-do list apps with advanced artificial intelligence driven heuristics to track your mood level throughout the day so it can recommend specific tasks to you when you are most likely to do them and it can even begin to predictively create tasks for you after learning your routines–there will be about 1,000 of these, maybe 10,000 of them. Every single wacko who thinks their workflow is the second coming of Christ gets to ship now. In the past they had to write self-help books detailing their pen-and-paper organization systems, and hope it took off randomly.
And, you know what, it's not like they don't deserve to get to ship. I mean, everyone's got the right to express themselves, at least if I was in charge that's the way it would be. But this basically describes my own minor AI reckoning, which I've been successfully pushing off by embracing, embracing, embracing. So... yeah. The fact that I ship more often than most no longer makes me particularly interesting. And even though I can ship with AI, I'm still attracted to simpler, basic projects. My workflows in life are simple. I see a to-do, I do it, I check it off. What more do I need? So if I were to make a to-do list app, how could I compete with aforementioned 10,000 AI-powered emotion tracking to-do list journaling apps? (Since I last mentioned these apps, they've all vibe coded in a journaling function.) I don't care about that stuff, so I am not going to spend my time building it. Now, suddenly, that's a serious disadvantage. Probably? Okay, it already was, I guess.
99.9% of humans have so much untapped potential, it's not possible to be human and not experience some twinge of fear at the idea that there's going to be a lot more creativity pouring into the world, sucking up all those precious eyeballs–and those eyeballs are the currency of the world, and not just financially, but emotionally, too. So many of us have traded community for an audience, every interaction online is just us selling ourselves to the crowd, begging to get even the smallest taste of going viral so that we know we're worth something. How do we stand out when anything that made us unique becomes a commodity accessible to anyone and everyone?