How tired are we collectively about AI? Are we over it yet? Can you even hear about it anymore? I'm sorry if you can't, because this essay will be entirely about it.
I admit, I'm slowly getting tired of it myself. But I also believe we have a good 20 months or so still riding the AI hype wave until it starts to slow down.
We've been accelerating massively in the past couple of months. Pretty much every month there is a new "groundbreaking" AI model. Every day there are countless new apps, services and startups promising the world to us. It's the new gold rush. But it will be here to stay. It's almost impossible to even feel remotely up-to-date with the news in the AI space, it's all happening so fast.
It feels like everything is up for grabs right now. The entire world is moving in a new direction. It's possibly one of the biggest moral & technological shifts since the invention of the internet.
Here are a couple of key observations from my perspective, in no particular order.
The moral shift
One of the biggest changes I see is copyright and intellectual property. AI allows us to plagiarize without feeling guilty about it. Something that would've been impossible 10-15 years ago from a moral standpoint, now feels completely feasible.
Some people will hate it, and some people will celebrate it. It depends on who you ask. But the shift is undeniable and the repercussions will be massive.
For example, Adobe now automatically opts you into a setting in which all your work/files are shared with Adobe so they can train their AI models on it. While you'd think there would be a massive outcry, there is very little pushback because the moral shift has already happened in which we're completely okay to surrender all our information to AI companies. The same happened with privacy over the past decade, which is equally dead today. In fact, I'd argue being careful with your data and privacy is a very boomer/millennial concern, and therefore a dying concept (once again, exceptions apply, but generally speaking I believe this to be true).
But then I think about the industrial revolution. It changed the world entirely and put millions of people out of a job who eventually had to re-train and find a new place within the new system. I believe the same to be happening now. The AI revolution is the industrial revolution of the digital realm. It's a firmware update for our society. It's the real computing revolution we've been waiting for.
Sometimes a new technology can only make it when our moral compass allows for it. We've collectively paved the way to where we are today for the past two decades, willingly or unwillingly. We came all the way from a time in which we didn't even share our real names on the internet, to today where we surrender all of our darkest secrets without any second thoughts. It's this moral shift which is driving our current technological advancements.
You can predict new apps, services and inventions solely based on our moral values, or the lack of them. For example, online dating used to be weird and not widely accepted, but today it's the norm. And the reason for this is less about technology, and more about the fact that we as society, slowly started to accept it into our culture. What will it be tomorrow? Something like Gattaca? I don't think we're far away from it.
The generational fight
I truly believe that all dialogue around this topic comes down to different generations. There's technically no right or wrong. Moral and ethics always change, if we like it or not. A moral shift can only happen when there's enough critical mass of a new generation that doesn't resist the new progress. Most people who have a problem with AI tend to be people who are now a bit older, around 35+. (I know, I just said 35+ is old, I'm sorry.) Most younger people seem to either love AI, or have no particular issue with it because that's all they have ever known. It's their technological moment. The same way we had Web 1.0 and the Web 2.0 boom (remember?), younger people now have the proliferation of algorithms and AI. The irony here is that the AI revolution is put in place by a small subset of "older" generations, in order to profit off of the younger generations. It's quite beautiful if you think of it from a pure economical standpoint. But it's also a bet that has yet to be proven – a $600 billion bet at this point. This money has to be made back, and we will be the one paying for it.
The values I was raised on are now completely obsolete, the same way some values my parents adhered to became obsolete the moment my generation took over and created the digital economy we know today.
Given all this, I try to look at it from the perspective of generations. Who's for it and who's against it usually comes down to how native it feels to you, how compatible it is with the worldview you formed when you were young. Our worldview is often shaped during our early years, and then we just hold on to it for the rest of our life. These moral shifts create tension between generations and challenge our definition of what's "right or wrong."
I'm getting lost here. My point is: What you think about AI mostly comes down to how far you are into life. How settled you are. Your professional seniority. How confident you are in your skills and abilities. How much experience you have and what values you hold dear.
The creator economy
When you look at big social networks, all of them have one big problem in common: Only a small percentage of their users would be considered "creators." The majority of people are silent consumers. They browse, they like, they might comment, but they don't create new content. But to keep the platform active and make you spend more time on it (stickiness), the platforms need more content. New content is what makes you come back again and again, and they need CREATORS to create that content for them. In fact, ideally content would just create itself. And that's why social networks absolutely LOVE the rise of AI. Because it lowers the barrier of entry. It gives the average person the tools to create something out of "nothing." The more people do it, the more content is being shared which is then being liked, remixed, commented on and so forth. The cycle repeats, and the numbers go up.
I don't think people appreciate just how much we've changed from just 15 years ago. Today everyone is a content creator, everyone is "productizing" themselves. Everyone is selling SOMETHING. And even if they're not, they're feeding the monster with more content. And it will only get easier and faster with AI.
Someone who was afraid to share an Instagram Reel before is now sharing dozens of them because AI tools make it so easy there are no excuses anymore. Is it a good thing? I will let you decide. But my point is: AI creation tools are a godsend for content platforms, and I can promise you they will milk it to death in every way they can.
On top of that: If the creation and automation of new content is increased, the quality is automatically going down. This results in even more content being created, because the no one feels bad for not adhering to a certain standard for quality.
You don't really care about AI
We're riding the AI wave right now. We're interested in new products and experiences solely because they have the word "AI" in it. AI is still a novel concept.
It's like discovering ketchup, and now we're re-inventing every recipe we already knew but with ketchup. But you can only do this for so long. At some point people will not care anymore. Give it another 20 months from now.
AI will still power everything, in fact it will be the bedrock of our digital experiences. But we just won't talk about it anymore, the same we we're not talking about "being online" as a novel concept anymore, because everything is online anyway. Imagine a bakery nowadays announcing that you can now order their bread online. Congrats, you made it to 2024, who cares.
When we started mymind.com back in 2020, we were one of the first to have AI features. It was nice to talk about them and it was a good marketing strategy. But recently we've scaled down our mentions of AI in our marketing materials because we just got tired of it. Who cares about AI, it's everywhere now and when it comes down to it, people care about what a product CAN DO FOR THEM, and not what specific technology makes it possible. We want mymind to stand on its own, without being attached to any hype terms. I mean we've seen what happened to Rabbit and the Humane AI Pin. Dead on arrival. And they're just one of hundreds of other examples.
AI is still a novel concept as of today, so we might be able to ride the hype train for a little longer, but I am 1000% certain it won't last. At some point you have to BE MORE than just "We're the AI solution in market X." Ultimately we will all go back to what we used to do 10 years ago, just now we do it with AI, which means we do it more efficiently, and that's about it.
AI in design
This is a difficult topic for me. I believe that AI will change the design industry forever. In the future more people will be able to "design." More companies will be able to ship designs without a designer even being involved. Software will be able to design itself, on the fly.
Are you surprised? I'm not. We put ourselves there for the past decade. Designers have worked incredibly hard over the past decade to collectively put themselves out of a job. Design systems and templates are just a small portion of this. "Digital design" has become so standardized that even a toddler can do it nowadays. Most of our apps and websites are now based on the same patterns. They're so reliant on the same "best practice" examples that they're all pretty much the identical. It needs no genius to figure it out anymore, let alone a dedicated designer.
I still believe there will be many designers, some of whom will do "original" work, but most of them will be more like "managers" who just input some stuff in the AI systems, modify it slightly, and move on to the next thing. Not a big difference to how it already is at most big tech companies, just now they can do it even more efficiently.
And due to the lower barrier of entry, we will see even more startups, apps and websites, giving more people access to our global digital economy.
Will I miss the old and golden days of design? Absolutely, I already do. I'm a romantic. And I'm sure due to my passion I will continue designing the old way, but I already know that the new "AI assisted designer" will pass me in the coming years.
I don't believe this is because AI will become necessarily better at designing, I just believe it will become faster and more efficient at it. And in a society in which we value quantity over quality, an AI will always win. It's the name of the game.
The counter wave
In the coming years we will continue down the path of hyper-efficiency and automation. We will continue in our new moral direction in which quality, trust, originality and "human touch" have no particular priority. We will disregard our old human values.
But this is where the counter movement is born. A small group of people will focus again on providing a more "human" experience. A more romantic premise of the world. A more personal experience.
Those designers will position themselves more as craftsmen/artisans, in which not only their work/output is different to automated systems, but where the entire experience of working with a human, a personal connection, becomes the selling point. Because it's not always just about the final end product, often it's how you got there that makes it interesting and worthwhile.
It will be the day where a new app launches that promises "a personal driver" because we're so sick of self-driving cars and we just want a human to drive us, speak to us and connect with us.
One day there will be hotels marketed as having "a human concierge experience" because we're collectively tired of an iPad in our face when we do our self check-in.
Companies who offer real customer support, because it will become a special experience to us compared to AI chatbots, and we're happy to pay a bit extra for a personal experience. (Funnily enough, this is already what modern modern luxury is about these days.)
I truly believe there will be a counter movement, and I can promise you I will be at the forefront of it. Not because I hate AI and automated systems, but because I love to build beautiful, human experiences. I'm old fashioned that way.
Most importantly, I believe that this new counter movement will be pushed by the younger generation as well, the same generation that is now fueling the AI movement. You live, and you learn. Motivated by a sort of nostalgia for a time they've never experienced, they'll bring back older values again. It's like a pendulum that swings. At least that's my optimistic outlook.
The winner
The most important question at the end of it all: Who's the winner of this entire AI race? It's the big tech companies. The ones who own the infrastructure. The ones who own the streets. There are no other winners. AI and the war for computation will always bubble to the top, there is no other way around it. The best AI models and AI tech will be exclusively available to a select few, and the rest will be available to "rent" through your regular cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google etc.).
You might say "no that's not true, AI is amazing because it democratizes information and everyone can run their own models." But I say bullshit to that. Nobody is going to run their own local AI models, the same way that nobody is building their own computer nowadays anymore. We're all using the same iPhones, the same laptops, the same apps and tools. We're lazy. There's a VERY tiny minority who actually still builds their PC themselves, installs Linux, runs their own DNS servers and uses a jailbroken phone. The rest of are completely addicted to the "ease of use" ecosystem. We won't bounce far outside our own walls.
The thousands of ChatGPT wrapper startups are only proof of that. AI technology (which basically is just computation) concentrates at the top because it's so expensive to run, it can only be done well by a very small group of companies, and even they are sweating hard to make it happen. Again, $600+ billion has been sunk into the current infrastructure revamp, and we've only started. AI is a big tech bet, and the only real winner is big tech, if it pays off.
