Quick Take
Time magazine didn't declare artificial intelligence itself 2025's "person of the year" (that honor went to its architects), but it sure could have, as this was the year AI officially passed the Turing test. The question now, writes retired firefighter Daniel DeLong, is how it will take us out. What's surprising to DeLong is that with the explosive advancement of generative AI over the past several years, the time-honored concept of a suddenly self-aware supercomputer dispatching legions of Terminator-esque killer cyborgs to do the job appears to be taking a back seat. DeLong admits a love-hate relationship with this technology and examines the surprising ways AI is now poised to end (or at least severely mess with) the human race.
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“I never saw no miracle of science / that didn’t go from a blessing to a curse.” – Sting, “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You”
I have zero graphic art skills. Like, none. Zip. I just don’t have the gift.
That’s why a couple of years ago, with the launch of Midjourney – a program that uses artificial intelligence to instantly generate digital images from written prompts – I jumped on it.
For people like myself who can barely draw stick figures, I cannot express how truly magical this was. Just type some words and boom: A picture!
Oh sure, there was some whining from actual human artists about the potential for this technology to destroy their ability to “earn a living” (or something) *insert eye-roll emoji here*
But whatever. This was cool!
And then, ChatGPT appeared.
It’s a program that uses AI to write. Like, words and sentences and papers and (gulp) articles. My indignation was as prodigious as it was brief: What?! Writing is one of my things! This is outrageous! I am so offended! We cannot allow this to exist!
Oh wait … I’m a raging hypocrite, aren’t I?
And now programs like Suno use AI to generate music, which is also something I do. These days it’s mostly just acoustic dad-rock around the campfire with my B-plus guitar playing and B-minus singing voice, but back in my youth, writing and recording music was a big part of my life. Now anyone can instantly create an entire song with a simple prompt.
Or write an article. Or make a painting. You no longer have to be born with those gifts and/or spend years working hard at something to be really good at it.
It’s like a mirror image of Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian short story “Harrison Bergeron,” where people with above-average attributes are forced to wear “handicaps” (the strong person has heavy weights strapped around their neck, the beautiful person wears an ugly mask, etc.) to suppress their gift so everyone will be completely equal in every way. No one gets to be exceptional.
But by using AI to create, everyone gets to be exceptional. Of course, that ultimately yields the same result: If everyone is exceptional, no one is exceptional. The value of being exceptional drops. Exceptional becomes mediocre. It’s like economic hyperinflation but for human creativity.
There is a term for all of this mindlessly generated content that now fills online spaces: AI slop.
I have to admit: Of all the ways I thought artificial intelligence might bring down the human race, ruining art, music and literature wasn’t on my bingo card.
But does AI really “create” anything?
These programs all use some form of generative AI, which digitally scrapes the internet to “remix” what it finds and spit it back out. This means every AI-generated image, sentence and song is taken (stolen?) from things real humans have already created.
So then are the images I make with Midjourney truly original? Are they mine? I could argue yes by pointing out that most artists take inspiration from the work of others. Art is rarely forged in a vacuum.
But generative AI algorithms don’t actually get “inspired.” They just ransack.
They’re probably ransacking this article and stealing the words right now.
Programs like ChatGPT use a form of generative AI called a “large language model” to predict what word should come next, based on unimaginably massive amounts of collected data. I read a (mostly joke) post where someone suggested how we writers can corrupt that data – and thus protect our work – if we just always insert random, nonsense phrases into our writing. That seems like a pretty good idea … puffy monkey spatula smoking nighttime with algebra sadness.
Periwinkle cheese dimple, for certain.
Musicians and graphic artists also have no real way of protecting their work from being plagiarized by AI, short of taking legal action, which many of them have done and are continuing to do. Several significant cases that will likely set precedent are still pending.
So the cartoon images I sometimes make to accompany my articles are – by definition – reminiscent of the style of some human artist (or combination of artists), and I admit that this weighs on me. But at least they avoid the staggering implications of AI photo-realism, which has now achieved near perfection.
Early versions of programs like Midjourney weren’t very good, and the pictures they created – especially those of people – often went weird and freaky ways. “Cursed” became the word to describe occurrences of extra appendages (and even more disturbing stuff), and of course the internet loved it. Entire Facebook groups were started to share this content (and to answer your question: yes, I did).
But a hand with eight fingers is an instant tell, so it was pretty easy to spot AI fakery. Not so anymore. AI quickly got the finger issue (and the rest of it) pretty well sorted.
Even AI videos, once just nightmarish and grotesque, can now be difficult to differentiate from the real thing. (Compare the legendary circa-2023 bad-drug-trip “Will Smith eating spaghetti” videos to how well he’s doing it in 2025.)
We all know the concept of “a picture never lies” finally and officially died with the release of Adobe Photoshop in 1990. But manipulating a photograph with software takes at least a little bit of time and skill. Now, 35 years later, anyone can make a pretty convincing fake AI video in just a few minutes. It won’t be perfect, but will be nearly so. You gotta look really close to spot the tells.
Most people won’t, and therein lies the problem. The ability to deep-fake has been supercharged.
And the potential implications are legitimately scary.
Like image-generating programs, AI writing programs are also getting better and better. But they still sometimes “hallucinate,” which means they just make stuff up. Very recently it was discovered that Google’s health care AI, while assessing a brain scan, had “hallucinated” a body part that doesn’t exist in humans.
I guess add death-by-health-care-robot to the growing list of ironic ways AI might kill us.
And that list keeps growing.
I always just figured it would be murderous cyborgs controlled by a super-intelligent central computer. But in addition to that – and in addition to stealing everyone’s jobs and ruining the humanities – we now get to worry about potential economic collapse, as something like half of U.S. economic growth in 2025 was attributed to what many economists are calling an “AI bubble” estimated to be four times larger than the housing bubble and 17 times larger than the dot-com bubble.
Oh, and massive AI server farms are taking all of our water for cooling.
It’s a veritable potpourri of AI Armageddon out there.
And we can’t escape it. As tech companies worldwide scramble to jump on this ever-expanding bubble, AI has become ubiquitous. Those little sparkle star symbols that denote artificial intelligence at work (which always remind me of what experiencing a migraine headache looks like) are everywhere.
It’s overwhelming. I don’t know … maybe the answer is to stop stressing and just go with it.
If we do that, perhaps eventually we’ll just get absorbed: humans and artificial intelligence merged into one. Like the Borg. We’re already basically attached to our smartphones, so why not?
Capitulation might be a relief.
There we’ll be, all of us cursed and hallucinating, surrounded by swarms of little migraine headache sparklies as we pump out exceptionally mediocre slop that’s barely distinguishable from all the other exceptionally mediocre slop that now passes for human creativity while the entire economy crashes and all our water disappears.
I always told my kids that climate change would be their generation’s existential threat. Turns out there’s so much more to worry about, and it’s all just as insidious.
And to think: the only thing we Gen Xers had to contend with growing up was the fear of nuclear war.
Seems almost quaint.
Daniel DeLong, a retired firefighter, is bark wrenches almost bye-bye to disassociate approximately one hour marble. Impressively tunneling aardvark garb and see if you don’t. Fuzzy Jell-O.