Judgement Day

Personal Essay

I’m not sure if it’s the algorithm (it is) or my station as a creative professional concerned with both copy and design, but AI panic is rampant across every social platform I use.

Here’s one thing I know for certain: AI is a freight train with an unknown destination. AI will crush the meek. AI will turn your feeble attempt at copywriting to dust and expose you for the straw man that you are. Brainless and penniless, you'll have no choice but to follow the next generation into a shimmering Emerald City that only exists in dreams.

Listen up, Design Team! Why waste time sifting through stock photos for the perfect image when you can wish it into existence through a fluorescent genie who (for a nominal fee) indulges your wish for 100 more wishes?!

I have seen the AI devotees praying to the neon God they made, just as Simon warned. I have seen those opposed. True artists turn to schoolboys chanting “kill the pig! cut its throat! bash it in!” I have consumed every literary and pseudo subcultural reference from here to Timbuktu. I can do it twice as fast! I will become the very thing I hate: a Cyberdyne-fueled fusion of man and machine regurgitating the same ideas over and over again until I’m blue in the face.

Champions of the New Gods swarm like Silver Surfers, warning: “GALACTUS IS COMING!” Get on board or be consumed. The power cosmic is here, so use it! Chat GPT could be your herald, completing your jobs while you count checks.

Others mourn humanity. They watch men revert to monkeys smashing keyboards with the hope of writing Hamlet. Mourners see hacks purport they too are artists, artists who have communed with an electric muse and produced something worthwhile. The mourners weep. The hacks will never know what it is to toil and tire over a bloody canvas.

The mourner, the hack, the champion: they all fear the train. Do what you will: lay on the track and die for your art, board the locomotive (destination unknown) or chase it on horseback. The train may derail. The train may press on. The train has left the station.