Hooray: Everyone is a Super-Hero Now!
<Spoiler Alert: Actually not, but Everyone wants to feel like one, and…>
TL:DR // Key Insights:
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AI provides enticing shortcuts to creativity, artistry, and self-expression but doesn't inherently enhance genuine human skill, creativity, or meaningful contribution — as a result often reducing people to imitators chasing superficial belonging.
The real challenge with AI hence lies in overcoming this "crisis of meaning" by consciously choosing to apply our authentic skills, effort, and creativity toward valuable human advancement, rather than passively surrendering to attention-driven superficiality.
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Oh yeah, oh yeah! Everything is possible now with AI! Create amazing images in seconds, make music with a few clicks, write a bespoke poem with nothing more than a prompt, turn yourself into a super-hero by uploading your photo to ChatGPT along with a prompt you found posted on Instagram… The possibilities are amazing and truly endless!
But wait. Does any of that make you a better human being? Or even an artist, a musician, a poet, …or a super-hero? Probably not. But it is getting quite clear that people might want to feel like all those things… The problem is however, that in order to become any of that, you actually need skills, and in order to develop those skills, you have to have talent - or at least invest some serious effort. And guess what: This is something that people are actually not that keen on doing. Most people do probably also understand on some level that taking those short-cuts with AI will actually not help them acquire any such skills, nor will it render them super-human - or even a more creative or better skilled version of themselves. So why are they still doing it? Why do they turn themselves into ridiculous little action figures or use AI tools to pretend they have more skills than they actually do?
Well yes, there is still all the stuff we have learned back in the day, when everyone wanted to become famous and make their content “go viral” on social media… First and foremost, people want to belong. And in order to belong, you don’t need to really understand how a thing works, you just have to imitate the person next to you, who appears to have understood it just enough to be able to use its mechanics so creatively that you’d want to imitate that person - in order to appear smart, creative and ‘in the know’: Monkey see, monkey do! Congratulations, you now officially belong to the newly established ‘in-crowd’ of AI-Hipster Sycophants. An intoxicatingly unnerving group of egocentric self-promoting people without any original idea of their own, and without any ambition to make the world a better place - other than for themselves and for their own position in it.
Am I being too harsh? Maybe, but also, maybe these people need to hear it. Because what we are missing in all this AI sycophantism is any real skill, any real effort, even any real attempt from people applying their own skills in a way that could further our society. And all that whilst it is often the very same people who also complain about AI still not being capable enough to fully take over all of their job tasks so they can finally stay all day on their sofa and relax whilst still pretending to have written all those emails - which in reality have been drafted by ChatGPT… Seriously: What has happened to us? Why are we so keen on AI automating our jobs anyway? Why is no one interested in doing any real work anymore? So much so that people even struggle with explaining what part of their jobs still qualifies as work in the first place!
That, right there, is the actual challenge of AI. And at the same time the most pressing human crisis, compressed into the format of a newly emerging technology: A crisis of meaning. We have successfully replaced a meaningful, ethical and socially valuable life with one focused merely on the short-term metrics of a fleeting attention economy, where nothing holds any inherent value - unless it can be immediately monetised through ad traffic as a result of a large enough amount of algorithmically enticed clicks. If you are not standing up to do something humanly valuable with AI, this system will certainly not do it for you. On the contrary, the algorithmic path of least resistance will likely lead to more people becoming soulless and skillless AI sycophants - only interested in driving up their self-promotional ‘attention value’ with a technology that is certainly not perfect, but could very likely do more than just that…
It’s on us! It’s on you and me to do more. To apply ourselves, to start utilising our skills again and to rediscover our own creativity… I have consciously decided to stay optimistic - what about you?