What AI Gave Back

I used to look away.

Whenever Sam Altman appeared on a screen or another story about artificial intelligence surfaced, I’d skip it. Change the channel. Dismiss it. There was a quiet hope that if I ignored it long enough, it might pass.

It didn’t.

One afternoon, sitting in a Starbucks trying to work on a novel, I found myself distracted by an AI course inside Mindvalley. For reasons I still don’t fully understand, I didn’t look away this time.

I opened it.

And stayed — not for a few minutes, but the entire day.

By the end, something had shifted. Not dramatically. More like a slow recalibration. AI wasn’t what I thought it was. And more importantly, it wasn’t going anywhere.

The fear, especially as a writer, is obvious. That something artificial could replace something deeply human. That language — the tool we’ve used for centuries to make meaning — could be outsourced, flattened, optimized.

But the more I worked with it, the clearer something else became.

AI cannot see inside my head.

And that matters more than I expected.

Everything it produces depends on what I give it — the specificity of my prompts, the sharpness of my thinking, my willingness to refine, reject, reshape. It doesn’t replace vision.

It exposes whether you have one.

Used carelessly, it generates noise.

Used well, it becomes something else:

a second set of eyes

a patient editor

a tireless assistant that never gets tired of you asking, “but what about this version?”

At one point, it told me my poetry wasn’t publishable yet.

That landed.

But instead of stopping there, I asked why. And it answered — specifically. Where the language drifted. Where clarity weakened. Where structure broke.

It didn’t diminish the work.

It clarified it.

That distinction changed everything.

What I began to see was not replacement, but amplification.

We already live in a world where much of our effort is repetitive — emails, formatting, first drafts, iterations that drain time but not creativity. AI accelerates those layers. Not the act of seeing, but everything surrounding it.

And speed, it turns out, does something unexpected.

It gives time back.

Time to think before responding.

Time to read without urgency.

Time to notice things that don’t demand productivity.

In my own life, that looks strangely simple: a hydroponic garden growing in my living space through winter, daily meals built from something I tended, more movement, more quiet.

More life that feels like life.

Not optimized. Not monetized. Just…lived.

There’s a larger question here, and I don’t pretend to have the answer. Economically, culturally — this shift is enormous. Some work will disappear. New work will emerge. Entire systems will have to adjust.

But at the level of an individual life, the question feels simpler.

What do we do with what’s returned to us?

If AI can take on the scaffolding — the repetition, the early drafts, the mechanical layers — then what remains is the part that was always ours:

attention

discernment

taste

care

The human work.

The part that happens outside.

Walking a dog without checking your phone.

Sitting long enough to hear the wind move through something.

Talking to someone without an outcome attached.

Making something that doesn’t need to succeed to be worth it.

We may be looking at this moment backwards — seeing only what could be lost, instead of what might be returned.

Not because the technology is inherently good.

But because it reveals how far we drifted from the things that never needed improving.

I still find myself defending it.

There’s resistance — especially among artists — and I understand it. There’s a fear of shortcuts, of dilution, of something essential being bypassed.

But what’s often invisible is the discipline required to use it well. The hours behind a single output. The iterations. The refusal to accept something that doesn’t match what you see internally.

AI doesn’t remove that.

It demands it.

And maybe the more interesting shift is this:

The less I feel the need to explain how I use it,

the more I understand what it actually is.

A tool.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

At 53, I don’t feel like I have time to wait for clarity to arrive slowly. I’m watching life differently now — through the lens of time passing, of people getting sick, of moments that don’t repeat.

So when I see a tool that helps me move faster through what isn’t essential — I use it.

Not to escape the work.

To get closer to the part that matters.

I don’t know where this leads at scale.

We’ll leave that to the experts.

Or maybe to AI.

And the experts can go to the beach.