Can I Use AI, Get Away With It, and Not Lose My Soul?

It’s here: artificial intelligence that’s good enough to do...something. Real humans tell GQ how they're quietly using AI to launch get-rich-quick schemes, build virtual secretaries, cheat at their jobs (to make time for their art), cheat at their art (to make more money), and soothe the anxiety caused by AI itself.

- By Foster Kamer Xania Monet

Artificial intelligence might be the only thing that Americans hate and/or fear as much as one another. Fun fact: According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, 55 percent of Americans believe AI—the technology that is supposed to cure cancer and usher in a 20-hour workweek—will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives. And yet, like SSRIs, credit scores, social media, minoxidil, and GLP-1s, AI has crept into more corners of society than you could possibly imagine. It’s baked into processes you already use, priced into things you buy, and—despite whatever moral or ethical objections to AI that you've got—secretly being deployed by people you know and (think) you respect.

So, so many more people are using AI than are willing to say as much. Talking to creative professionals for this story, I encountered some of the most intense paranoia and vitriol of my journalism career. Even people who hate AI wouldn’t go on the record, out of the fear they'd seem technophobic.

Welcome to our present moment with AI: early, weird, uncomfortable, inescapable, freaky. It’s laden with potential and comically ripe for grifters. Nobody can predict whether, a year from now, the boosters and sceptics among us will be seen as daft rubes or deft early adopters, heroic holdouts or hopeless Luddites. Anyone who claims to know what’s coming has given you a decent indicator that they’re probably not worth listening to. That, maybe, is the first thing to know.