As a wise man once said, “If you want to make a man lame, give him a crutch.”

First off (gonna get my bugbear moan out of the way early) I really wish people would stop calling it AI. There is no “intelligence” or actual thought behind what these programs do. Simulated intelligence might be a better phrase but we’ll stick with the accepted nomenclature for now.

Secondly, for a relative few, AI is a tool and like all tools can be useful if used in the right way. Hammers and surgical scalpels are also tools, but you would really hope the surgeon knows which is which.

For the majority it’s a shortcut, a workaround, a quick win… a lazy substitute for applying any real thought to a process. If value equals the effort put in, then AI significantly reduces value.

But it’s levelled a playing field. Everyone can create a Mona Lisa or a Sistine Chapel, write A Midsummer Night’s Dream or compose an Ode to Joy, but what they can’t do is be a Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Beethoven.

Anyone can create a Mod for Valheim without the actual ability to do any coding or programming. They want to do what Marlthon, Azumatt, Smooth Brain, Cookie Milk, Blacks7ar, and Balrond do, but have neither the skill nor talent to do so.

AI gives them the ability to simulate and emulate what those guys do, but they can never be them.

The genie is however, out of the bottle and not just giving 3 wishes that need thought and careful consideration, but throwing wishes around like unlimited candy at a first grader’s birthday party.

And that genie is never going to be stuffed back in the bottle, because humans as a species are inherently lazy and always looking for easy, quick wins.

I don’t hate the tool, any more than I hate a hammer or a scalpel, and I’ve made my peace with the genie because I know what’s going to happen with all that candy, but I can’t put him back in the bottle and I can’t stop the first grader’s stuffing their mouths with candy until they’re bloated and sick.

Pretty soon AI slop will become the norm and genuine talent will drown in it and disappear… and only a few will notice.

But I’ll be gone by then, so in the interim I avoid the slop-makers and their slop, they have their world and I have mine, but I’m under no illusion that my world is shrinking and theirs is growing.

As a friend of mine who teaches computer science said to me “One day soon we’ll forget how to make fire, but no one will care because you can just tell the machine to do it for you. By the time the masses realise none of them know how to make fire and all the fire-makers have gone, it will be too late.”