The AI Optimist

Gazing into the deep brown eyes of Shelley, my breath slows and my heart calms. German Shepherds do that for me, I post way too much about her.

Suddenly, a German Shepherd video pops in my feed; I watch, of course. The video ends, and there’s 2 more. Next day, more, and the next day, more and more, until all I’m seeing are German Shepherds.

Training vids, playing vids, weird little dog dressed as human vids: I’ve never seen so many new dog ads.

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My breath speeds up, that little gurgle in my stomach feels like eating a bad shrimp. Something’s watching me, maybe listening to me through my phone, I don’t know what.

Makes me nervous to like or comment on something, because I’ll get more of things I don’t really want. Faster.

Maybe I should just trust the science of what’s going on and ignore what’s happening. But that’s like turning your eyes away from a rat with giant balls.

It probably needs a wheelbarrow to walk down the street.

Curious, I dove into the link to find out more. I don’t know much about scientific publishing, but I do know AI images, and this is clearly one. Imagine how bad the research is?

I found the rat in the paper, “Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway.” I’d translate that for you, but I can’t, though clearly testicles are involved.

Seeing that on an X post gave me ju-deva – seeing something I wished I’d never seen before. I mean, they’re twice the size of their head parts. It probably needs a wheelbarrow to walk down the street.

Surprised to find this in the Frontiers journal, a science publisher who claims to be “safeguarding peer review to ensure quality at scale”. This study went through an editor in India, then reviewers in the US and India approved. OK, and no one noticed the massive growth dominating the image like elephantitis.

Good to find somebody noticing the words on the rat’s image had misspellings and nonsense phrases, like Midjourney gibberish. The X post went viral, scientists and armchair commenters knowing nothing about science, all attacking the study.

The researchers didn’t hide their AI usage for the rat drawings.

The US reviewer, when asked about the rat, said it was Frontier’s issue, not his job.

Frontiers retracted it with a disclaimer saying; we’re just the publisher. The problem lies with the person publishing.

No one accepts responsibility. Meanwhile, do you trust scientific research that comes with humongous rat testicles created by AI?

“Trust the science” is blurted out by people who aren’t scientists. People on social are looking for a little anger, stoking their tribe’s anger to get seen. AI is the bad label, then it’s all crap.

I’m wondering what happens to these people, and their research when the AI slap happens. Especially in academic circles where science research lives, did this study hurt the researchers who created it, because of a viral social screamfest?

So I went to Jason Rodgers, who now is a Forensic Officer with the Scotland police.

I asked him what he saw as the biggest challenge in detecting fake-generated scientific content:

“I believe the biggest challenge with AI-generated science content is going to be the risk of false positives…

Recently they’ve also started bringing in automated AI checkers to see if there’s any AI-generated content in there. I’ve seen online people, complaining or claiming… their submissions, which are 100% original content company, are being flagged as having a high content of AI-generated media. That’s been either dismissed or flagged for additional review, or they’re being penalized for it in some way.

I don’t know whether their claims are true or not, because I don’t know the people and I haven’t seen their submissions… I think my biggest worry is false positives.”

My mind was still so wrapped around the rat balls image; I didn’t think about what that judgment does to researchers. We don’t trust anything with AI attached to it.

But we use AI detection tools, famous for not being that accurate, to do the work. And the judgement of AI-generated media is trusted by universities and publications - to protect them against the stigma of using AI.

We can’t trust if something is real, or fake. While the rat image was fake, the actual research was solid, and retracted. Cancelled by its use of AI.

Those in the firing line of AI detection must prove they wrote their work. The problem is every paper that looks right, reads right, passes every check — and nobody reads it. Not even the ones punishing you for using AI, because they can’t tell the difference.

Neither can the bleary-eyed student rubbing sleep out of their eyes, afraid they are better at science than writing. Knowing their average skills might trigger AI detection tools. The tools aren’t accurate; that’s a coin flip. We assume it does the job better than a human would.

And I can’t trust if Shelley’s real, or AI.

When I go to Facebook, I don’t click on any German Shepherd videos, and they go away.

When a reviewer sees a rat with a giant penis, slow down and fix the rat’s balls.

We don’t trust AI, but we trust AI to punish.

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Tell me about a complicated tool that woke in November 2022, with a colorless blog post, and a tweet – instant intelligence is no small feat. No screaming “predictions are almost true,” the intro was understated, and clay cool.

5 days later a million people using, and ChatGPT mania starts brewing. Time to make this bigger than big can be, grab everything on the internet because it’s all free.

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That’s the dream, keep repeating it until it’s true. Faster, faster, faster until you barely breathe, we need every single morsel of human genius, earthy creativity - to plant the seeds in this artificial, general, becoming intelligent tool. We’re the future, we’re the new rule.

Algernon, an AI engineer, remembers that day. Sitting, still in the same room. The pale blue glow on his lily-white face, the whirring sounds of machines that create - but they needed lots of examples to understand and operate.

One day, searching for beautiful patterns for his AI to start, Algernon stumbled upon Fiora’s one-of-a-kind claymation art. “Perfect!” he thought, “The shapes, the colors, the figure I never knew anyone could do - with clay, how cute. 100x my heart!”

He scraped all her photos, those figures made of clay born in a brain, and appearing online. Imagine how many new figures will come from this turning, one thought becomes a million fractals, and shapes, and learnings.

Meanwhile in a world made of soft, colorful clay lived a kind artist named Fiora. Nurtured with her hands in the ground, brown clay becomes faces she dreams; sounds she has seen. Her nimble fingers imagining, she molds random creatures, bringing new friends to life.

Big ones, small ones, and even one named Jay, who looked a little like Pinocchio on a good day. That pointed hat and the smile clear, Fiora’s hand fills each twist from ear to ear, going from formless to character, color, and a smooth shape.

The clay still holds marks as the slow world turns. As the rosy fingers of dawn heated her eyes, she stumbles to check her phone and the time, scrolling and swiping when…stop! An email appeared, stamped in red ink, like the color Fiora feared.

For minutes Fiora stared at the screen, trying to read lines that had no in between. How can they own what I make? Pulling her knees to her chin with a chill, what once was her clay was now someone’s content mill.

A million artists have felt this, a million more complain.

Fiora decided to write her own refrain:

“And so the children were told from that day,
Tools can remember, and tools can replay.

But something felt different, not quite the same,
AI held stories, but never a name.

Algernon? He’s on Discord. Fiora messaged him for a quick Zoom, if you’re game to play, of how someone can take what I’ve shaped out of the earth’s clay. Simply because they know the AI way.

Algernon’s jaw swiftly droops, snapping up to make sure he appears concerned. We need to align incentives, he said, “I never meant harm… and really, there is no harm. Your clay isn’t in there anymore, it’s broken into many pieces we call tokens.

What this person did with it isn’t what my AI is supposed to do, and getting your work out is honestly - pretty impossible too.”

Fiora’s eyebrows raced to the sky, flushing toward him with her plea.

I’m not trying to break what you do, I just need to get this out so I can be protected too.

Algernon considered the content, safety, and ethical clues. There’s no end to the content I need, the views and ideas and perspectives and even the greed.

Sorry. I woke up this morning losing what I’ve created, taken by an AI operator who somehow got it out.

If he can do it, is it really that hard to take it all out?

Algernon knew he could try a little hack, no guarantees but it might help the argument. Still, removing content means all sorts of impacts. Jira tickets maybe?

He begins to pick out the data that once was Fiora’s clay, an imprecise stab to make it all go away.

Algernon walks out the door, his job done and tomorrow brings more.

The name in red Fiora knew too well. She had that before.

Thanks for the reminder.

Inhaling deep rhythms, she hums:

“You can copy the shape, the sound, or the art.
But you can’t copy me, or the spark in my heart.”

Fiora knows things with her hands that Algernon has only read about.

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Be very very quiet. I’m AImaxxing, I learned about it on X. Before someone else replaces me, I replace myself with AI. And tell everyone it’s me, no one can tell the difference.

I don’t have to tell you things are strange. Everybody knows things are strange. We’re not just losing work. We don’t know what work even is anymore. The things we create are being copied, remixed, and sold back to us.

You can’t tell what’s real. You can’t tell who made what. You can’t tell if you’re talking to a person, a script, or a system trained on a million other people.

We are informed, entertained, predicted—and slowly replaced.

And what do we do?

We stay inside the AI lines. We personalize it. Optimize it.

We say, ‘Just make it easier. Just make it faster. Just make it mine.’

I’m AI’s problem child. And I’m afraid. I still don’t know if I’m using it right.

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Neither does anyone else. My boss doesn’t know what he’s looking for but he knows it’s AI First. And AI told him to give a 30-second speed rap before leaving, while we all try to keep up with the words pouring out:

“Whatever it can do, let it do; THEN let’s figure it out together, once it’s learned everything you do. Together.”

Follow the AI advice from our leader. He signs my paycheck. AI signals my interest in staying here, unless I’m replaceable. After an hour of reviewing where my rogue AI agent went post crazy, I’ve got an hour to write 2500 words.

There’s no way to do this without AI. They don’t sleep. That’s an advantage. The kind I’ll never have and that kind that makes me a problem. From the beginning, or AI First Principle. Whatever you call it, the only difference between me and another worker, is what we do with AI.

ChatGPT told me that the other day, or my boss emailed it. I confuse the two. His job was done, my job begins. And will it last?

Fighting AI is like swinging in the air, sucking spare oxygen so I can keep breathing in my new, 72-hour AI work weeks. The 996, nine to nine 6 days a week so we survive, because AI gives us the power to do it. That email freaked me out at first, though honestly with all the extra time correcting and babysitting AI, I need more hours to get things done.

I’m not here to add ideas, I’m here to crank out massive volumes of AI-shaped content, see how I work less and do more? Except for all those late-night check-ins with that Agent thing that doesn’t work. No one counts those hours anyway, unless they are saved from 9-5.

I’m following the rules. Deadlines get shorter and expectations higher, that’s probably me being tired. The tools are the change. Optimize yourself and follow closely.

Good enough is, enough. AI is like a word tailor, measuring 2D me. Forget editing, that’s a good draft, chalk it up to saving an hour. Good for me. That’s working so well, I’ll give all first drafts to AI, from what works, not what I think might work. And it always sounds the same. Perfect.

I’m not afraid of my boss, I’m afraid of what’s next. At best I’ll work longer using AI to save me time. At worst I’ll be replaced or found out for using AI to do my work, like I was asked to....

I know I’m a Problem Child. Follow the smarter leader I say, and it’s not my boss. Welcome to the AI Dome, I hope they let me stay here another year. Or stand up to make things a little harder for this brilliance changing my life.

I’ll go along and leave a bit of confusion along the way.

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I’m the half full AI Optimist, with a little half empty pessimism. When there is no glass at all.

Your voice matters before it’s trained away, your ideas matter before they’re averaged out, your work matters before it becomes data.

There’s you in front of this giant overhyped piece of shift. I don’t want you to smash your devices. I don’t even want you to reject AI.

Remember the original you.

I am not just training material. Am I?

Appreciate the read, thanks!

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When Sierra Hull’s mandolin made the old Felton Music Hall near Santa Cruz hum, I could feel everything tingle. From my head to the tips of my fingers, the gap between the audience and the music filled with sweet bluegrass.

Now when I revisit those songs on Spotify, memory becomes feeling. I listen again. Not to go back in time, to be with that song now.

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Something I share with the fans of Xania Monet, who will never see her in concert, because she, and her music, are AI - except the words. And the 5,661 comments I saw bonding around the words, the moment, and the way a good song turns a swarm of people into a shared group.

They say AI can’t make you emotional or have emotions. Tell those commenters.

It makes me wonder what happens to working musicians when the audience discovers it doesn’t need them to feel what an AI song gives them?

Xania’s followers listened and found her AI song Let Go, Let God as a place to bear witness, to share and connect, feelings rising like this:

“First time hearing this song it had me crying my eyes out stood in my kitchen, this song is something special.”

“Who else is here crying from pain but this song provides peace”

“I cried the first time I heard this and I did let go”

Her words are the difference. AI is the instrument, not the artist. “Music poetry” is what I felt. Without Suno, the words would have lived only on the page, not in our ears.

Their Felton moment was first hearing the song, and witnessing where they are now. Poet Telisha “Nikki” Jones wrote lyrics, blended them through Suno, and created songs. The music is AI, the words human and poetic.

Because a poet’s words sung by a voice that doesn’t exist turned out to have real emotional value. The kind that sparks people.

She’s not alone as an AI singer. Few get that passionate reaction, or recognition. Much less payment, or respect.

Xania got Billboard’s attention before receiving $3 million from a label. A poet’s voice rose with Suno’s help.

When I first heard Eddie Dalton sing, that smooth patient BB King sound I love rose from this music. Not a copy - AI but good - a style connected to my love of blues. Then I read the comments, bonding instead of trolling: these must be fake AI, right?

“First time we heard this song. We never heard of this singer before. But, we are captivated. The lyrics are true to life, but what a voice.”

“Beautiful. Not everyone gets to get old, appreciate every day.”

“I just found out this is AI, but I hope the lyrics came from a real person. “

This audience largely can’t go to concerts. They’re 60, 80, 89 years old, managing diabetes and kidney disease and cancer recovery. They found this on a Facebook reel.

For them, the music came to where they already were, sounding like what they already loved, saying things they needed to hear. That’s not deception, and it’s also by design.

Dallas Little is a creator who has been testing AI music and singers. Eddie Dalton is one of the latest on Little’s label, Crunchy Records. He previously created Biscuit Beats, with country, AI Trump parodies, and shock comedy mixes. He also created Solomon Ray, who was in the gospel charts in late 2025.

He’s an operator and creator, who broke through because the lyrics, music, and audience targeting blend into something memorable for his listeners.

I read many articles attacking Little as a content farm creator. I see someone who understood an audience deeply enough to build a voice, a visual identity with lyrics that land, and find the right people who care the most for Eddie Dalton’s music.

Maybe we’re less scared of losing musicians and more scared of what’s coming. Music with this kind of intelligence is its own form of art.

Until it’s used to take someone else’s work, name, and YouTube pay, like Murphy Campbell.

Murphy sings and plays traditional folk music on her banjo on YouTube with 42,000 followers for her music. Then one day YouTube emails her, saying she’s got copyright claims against her channel. Because she doesn’t own the rights to her own music.

Someone else is getting paid for her sound and songs, under her name. They download her YouTube videos and upload their AI versions, and copyright them with her name. Ouch.

Real folk musician, real voice, cloned by a bad actor who was naive enough to contact her: they almost shut down her ad revenue. Her Instagram audience rallied, Vidya and YouTube took the clone down within a week. She owns her work again.

Her audience knew her and loved her music. Both Xania’s and Eddie Dalton’s audiences have no one to defend because there’s no one to know. And anti-AI folks will note that the sources of their music will never be known, since those songs were vacuumed up like crumbs on a floor, and rearranged in AI.

Now a smarter thief would have never notified Murphy and just created a different name. How would she ever find out?

It’s hard for us all to tell the difference.

In a survey, 97% of Deezer users comparing two songs couldn’t tell the difference between AI music and music generated by people. They want to reject AI music, but they can’t tell when they’re listening to it.

Music is the thing that gives people permission to feel, out loud, dancing with strangers in a room or sharing love on social media.

And it turns out the permission doesn’t require a heartbeat behind it. Unless you want the complete Felton live vibe we felt. YouTube isn’t live, but the comments are real, the feelings are real.

A poet who didn’t sing found a voice through AI. The voice found an audience that felt every word.

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Furiously pushing those furry brown feet faster, making the golden wheel blur. What’s the difference between the wheel and the hamster? Both stay in the same place, while moving. Bored or stressed, hamsters seriously love the wheel.

Turn off the video, back to doing AI in 2023. Feels like I’m hugging air as I prompt and reply – up, down, and around Claude’s answers. Like I’m hunting for ideas, maybe make more content. Problem is there are plenty of ideas.

Even AI doesn’t answer the hardest problem: no one is paying attention.

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What step am I missing that keeps me falling behind?

It’s too simple to believe. All this content speed overwhelms people. Like me, they pile it on social media so much, we know it’s not social.

AI increases the volume of content, which makes attention scarcer. Vibe code your way out of that.

Feelings? Nah. I’m spinning.

For 2 years I poured every ounce of my energy and heart into the AI Optimist podcast, following the ChatGPT craze. Testing ways to work with AI to produce content.

Writing, performing and editing my own videos – more outlined than scripted. Let AI improve my editing and help me create an article from my spoken words.

I didn’t miss a week in over 18 months.

My signal wasn’t clear.

I was fishing for ideas in the AI soup. It was like I could do anything. And anything is what I got.

When I shared the creators’ side, the techs disliked it. When I shared the tech’s side, the creators disliked it. And neither returned.

Everything AI was blowing up, people quickly built huge followings. Famous people and people making content out of what famous people say. AI-generated content people called slop and still went to the top of…pretty much everywhere.

I’m not famous and I wasn’t expecting it to explode, but when it’s so quiet you can hear the crickets? Silence lacks comments.

I asked Claude who responded: do you have a friend to talk this over with? That’s when I started testing out some avatars. New. Not me.

Use AI to create more, use AI to sort what you created, use AI to figure out what matters from what AI sorted.

Version 1 avatar was me, raw and creating live. Nope. That one quickly fell to Version 2, Interview avatar. My guests are great and the shows were good, but when I did my podcast alone, the show did better.

My wheel stopped.

And the cost isn’t burnout or wasted time — it’s that you disappear. Not dramatically. Quietly.

You get replaced by the avatar version of yourself that the loop requires. The optimized you. The distributed-across-five-platforms you.

Everyone’s racing to produce more and landing with less. Your content was your signal. The problem is the system can't tell the difference. The loop doesn't reject signal. It drowns it.

We have edges machines don’t, notched from the years like rings in a tree.

Find what no AI could ever reveal: you.

What’s the signal only you can send?

We need your Signal, mine are here. Free

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When I walked in the room dancing in greens and blues and reds, the loud quiet of the artist painting pierced with the gentle scraping of a rod along the chak-pur, vibrating sands fall like a stream and become a painting.

It’s like watching magic. Then in a few days, the painting is gone, and that’s the point. We go in for the temporary to understand. Nothing lasts.

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Because the joy the artist brings fills the room along with the regular and rhythmic scraping of the chak-pur. The action connects us to what comes out, we’re part of it, and while it’s sad it goes away, we view knowing it will not last.

The gift is being there, in that moment of time when it becomes real….and then isn’t. Like many current AI companies leading the hype cycle. I’m good with the quiet creative monk doing work that won’t last.

The mandala came out of quiet actions, intense practice, and a goal. Create and destroy. Sort of like loud AI promises chasing trillions with predicted futures that rarely happen.

Sora the AI video app was built to last, at least a few years ago. Disney jumps in with incredible content and $1B investment promise. And now one is demoted and the other is gone.

It’s like we’re in the room waiting for the mandala to appear, then we let it go for 2 years before wiping it away with an executive’s signature. At least the monk gave us a limited time period, we’ve spent two years using Sora and you just say goodbye like that?

Still for them it’s a financial decision, not taking away an essential tool used to develop a skill that’s not easy to transfer. Like a monk sand painting. We ask creatives and visual artists to build the future with AI, and then the future is cancelled. Because it’s burning money like a fast spreading grass fire.

And how do you know the next AI video tool you depend on won’t suffer the same result? AI video right now is bad business. The “that’s part of early tech” excuse may work, and it’s also a question of why we are doing what we’re doing.

Then the future happened for Sora. Demoted from App Stores, the standalone app is shutting down, the model survives behind the ChatGPT paywall.

From one of the most downloaded apps 5 months ago to the dustbin of the paywall. The people who use it are left out. Good luck with Sora, go to another tool; many use all the tools because they don’t trust them to last. And no single one is the best, yet. The whole AI mantra, train yourself blather, goes quiet as the AI video tools drop from too much usage and too little money.

Unlike the Tibetan monks making their art into a feeling and a memory, of missing that painting when it goes away. We owned it for a while, even a few weeks, then it’s no longer. The life cycle in a nutshell, delivered with a smile that the end has as much meaning as the beginning. What you put into the work is what comes out, even when it goes away.

I’m rooting for the monk because watching someone build and create makes you tingle with what’s happening. I felt that with AI, then the emptiness of the visions adapting to whatever the money asks. Not what people want, or what solves problems.

The monk knew in the end, the painting was gone for a reason.

We don’t know that with GenAI at all.

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The silent screaming of the massive “Stop Hiring Humans” sign at the entry to TechCrunch Disrupt let me know….

Welcome to the AI Jungle - it’s not for you, human!

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Engineers built the AI jungle with moats, not people, as their goal. Control. Now I have a choice; take the AI First side or leave, because you’re the wrong species.

Striding through the crowd, all the speakers, all the hundreds of AI startup booths, from countries around the world? All humans, people really. Even the ones who were buying the service to replace humans. Praising the speed and efficiency of AI over people with the dawn of robots, hyperscalers, and artificial general intelligence – AGI oooooh.

I’d try to push back, but AGI rolls out of their tongues like a lyric they love. SUPER INTELLIGENCE, smarter than humans, smartest in any class, #1!

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When I ask them what they’re working on and how it works, no one knows. They were part of something big that in the end wouldn’t make them part of it. It doesn’t matter. Let’s look at why you need people to do things.

The chill it gave me, in a room of true believers, walking past row after row of tech brilliance for business and governments, was from seeing little that might improve people’s lives today. While everyone wraps their business around artificial intelligence, where is the real intelligence that serves without removing people?

I had to go deep to find a booth who owns what they do, where it’s not just what AI does, it’s what AI does for people. Because AI to me is intelligence applied to structures and problems first, not AI first.

Like Jane observing a male chimpanzee in Tanzania, I wasn’t going deep without changing.

“I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker—yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.” — Jane Goodall

She watched David Greybeard fish for termites with a blade of grass. She’d been told this was impossible. He wasn’t performing. He was just doing what worked. Intelligence.

“Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.” — Louis Leakey, surprised and responding to Goodall’s observations

Sounds like the same question I have with AI. So many of our early efforts are to try to make AI human. We give AI names, project human yearnings for power on code, and play with the happy schadenfreude of being replaced at work and maybe eliminated from the planet because we’re not efficient. Have a good day.

I’m looking for David Greybeard in a way. Intelligence with empathy, like a friend while not pretending to be human. Not artificial. Instead, I stumble around a crowd staring at a cold robot, rotating and looking at us while doing tricks. A Roomba vacuum wasn’t a Roomba because it used AI to roll on carpet. That’s a weird been there done that AI moment.

Then the booth with two large eyes. She stopped me.

Not the banner. Her face. Rendered into a simple image a design team builds in an afternoon. But no wide customer-service smile. No tilted head of practiced concern. Just a woman looking back at you with the stillness of someone who has heard hard things and didn’t look away. She helps.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Booth: The Team at RUTH

Ask RUTH (free)

Her eyes don’t ask anything of you. In a convention hall full of avatars built to sell, she looked like she was built to listen.

That’s what made me stop and ask them to interview. Helping social advocates with AI, working on some of the most difficult problems we people bring, and connecting them to intelligence specifically for them, where they live.

Most AI companies are built around what they can take from you. Your data, your attention, your trust; all of it fuel for something else, someone else’s exit. RUTH is built to give back, in a way I never thought about.

Most AI applications harvest user data, RUTH deliberately maintains zero knowledge of its users. No emails collected, no names stored, no digital breadcrumbs left behind.

Megs Shah, founder of Parasol Cooperative, shares why:

“I’ve been in data for God knows how long,” Megs explains,

“and I’ve been on the side of

‘let’s collect every possible piece of information we can about a person.’

But being on the survivor side of the mindset now, I’ve realized that could revictimize people.

The goal for us is ensuring we’re not participating in that.”

RUTH is in many countries now. Nobody got rich. Many people are getting help in a situation where the information is needed right then. That’s the point.

A relative suddenly got rushed to the hospital and we weren’t sure if he’d make it out. He has a son, and in this tense time of figuring it out, a bunch of people had a bunch of ideas about what would be best for the son. Panicking because they had to plan for something that hit them out of nowhere.

We need information, people to talk to, and where to go, while we’re freaking out. Then I remembered those two empathetic eyes, RUTH the chatbot, and dove in with our situation.

Within an hour, I had contact information, a suggested list of things to consider, a guide to resolve the situation and getting help from the trusted local sources in my little rural town.

When technology does things you didn’t think possible like this, it feels like magic.

RUTH gave me answers that helped one little boy and the people taking care of him. Maybe that’s the AI that should take over the world….with us.

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If this touches a chord, feel free to share it. Shows how AI doesn’t have to replace us.

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I feel like an alien using GenAI. Like a monkey trying to evolve.

I’ve felt what happens when you say AI out loud in certain, “creative” rooms. Breathing stops and judgment starts, it goes quiet. I’m wrong before I’ve got a chance to speak.

Same silence I felt moving halfway through first grade to a class of new strangers. In school they moved me to the lowest tier, the kind needing extra help to read. They looked and judged me, the same instant stereotyping that happens to AI users now.

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Didn’t matter if I’d been reading books for a few years by then. My introversion was their reason to classify me as a lower intelligence. Like an outsider to their world.

When I share about GenAI positively, or at least not ripping it out as some plague on society, the silence is loud. Not from me, from terse comments and deletions. Disdain.

Same reason I shut up in first grade; I started believing the teacher was right, and kids called me dumb – ironic as that means mute - even though I wasn’t.

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Instead, I got quiet and adapted into part alien, part monkey, and part creator. A little like I feel today as I keep getting asked the same gotcha question.

Let’s name what’s happening, because it has a name. The person using GenAI gets your contempt, because what they do is alien. I just want to understand what primal principle that is. The ones shouting loudest online are writers, mocking those using GenAI. And writers like that rarely try it or if they do, use it to create crap.

It’s a feeling petrified into a stance. A variety of shames for any action. Using GenAI to create an image, using it to edit? Shame on you, that’s a social signal like cheating.

I’ve seen it up close. Say you use AI and watch what happens. Not always. But often enough. The unfollows. The deleted posts. The quiet removal from conversations that were fine yesterday. Move along alien.

I understand the fear underneath it. I do. Worrying that something real is being lost. That the tools are moving faster than we can. That some people will use GenAI to replace craft rather than improve it, and the flood of mediocre output will make it harder to find the work that matters.

These are real concerns deserving real conversations.

Still I wonder if this crowd would cheer for a macaque’s right to own his selfies, while treating a human using GenAI as the red line that cannot be crossed.

So yes. The monkey case is about more than a monkey. And let me start there, because Naruto deserves his moment.

In 2011, a crested macaque named Naruto found a camera in an Indonesian wildlife reserve and did what any of us would do. He picked it up and took photos of himself. Lots of them. Some of them were good. Composed, even. The kind of selfie most humans can’t manage to do.

PETA sued on his behalf, to make a point. The argument: Naruto made the work. Naruto should own it.

The photographer who owned the camera, who set up the conditions, who traveled? He kept 75% of the revenues. Agreed to donate the rest toward protecting Naruto’s habitat. The humans sorted it out. Naruto went back to being a macaque. He never left the jungle.

Nobody called the photographer unethical for profiting from a photo he didn’t technically take. No one blamed Naruto for a rogue selfie. The story was funny. Everyone moved on and found a compromise.

Now here’s where it gets strange.

Starting in 1911, a group of people in Chicago began receiving messages from what they described as celestial beings. Superhuman intelligences. Non-human minds transmitting thousands of pages of cosmological and spiritual teaching through a person who received the transmissions, processed and shaped them into something readable.

This became the Urantia Book. 2,097 pages. Still studied over 100 years later. The origin story is exactly as unusual as it sounds.

In 1955, the Urantia Foundation applied for copyright. The question the courts had to answer over the next 40 years: can work authored by non-human intelligence be protected? Who owns the output of beings that may or may not exist?

The one who received the non-human intelligence and translated it into something the world could use?

He’s the human in the middle, who ended up owning it. I think about first-grade me with that book. Taking in something external, making it mine. Not so different. What’s a book without a reader?

Celestial intelligence made the Urantia Book. Everyone found this fascinating. No one called it plagiarism. No one questioned the ethics of working with a non-human mind. The book has sold millions of copies over the years.

In 2023, a woman named Kristina Kashtanova wrote a graphic novel, Zarya of the Dawn. She wrote the story herself. She used AI to generate images, selected the ones that worked, arranged them, and built the book. The Copyright Office gave her protection for the text, the selection, the book.

The AI-generated images inside? Unprotectable. Not enough human authorship in the generation of each one.

What’s less defensible is which one gets treated as plagiarism by some. As a moral failure.

I was raised, in the US, on a specific idea of intelligence. Read. Write. Memorize. The person with the most stored in their head won. That was the model. The test was: can you reproduce what you’ve accumulated? Can you write the essay without looking anything up? Can you show your work using only what’s already inside you, RIGHT NOW?

When I moved in the middle of first grade, shy and introverted, my new cutting-edge grade school in Massachusetts saw me and put me in the lowest of 3 tiers of classes based on intelligence. And I’d been reading books since I was 5 years old.

Luckily my mother’s diligence and care made them reconsider me. I’ll never forget the man walking into the room and asking for me, but thought it was another boy in the class. He gave him the book and the boy wasn’t yet able to read. He gave it to me and recognized I knew how to read. No one asked me before.

But without my mother’s urging, I’d have been stuck in that class. Because the measure of intelligence in those early days was extroversion. Now it’s being human. While we don’t know if intelligent life is out in space yet, we do know there are many different intelligences on this planet.

Dolphins show advanced social complexity, self-awareness, and communication skills. Elephants also show self-awareness, with long-term memory and emotional depth. AI, in its way, is another intelligence we don’t yet understand. Maybe the 20th century book centric way is opening up learning to listening, watching, and experiencing.

I love books. I’m not arguing against reading. But I’m old enough to remember when that model was the only model. A lot of people it was supposedly serving weren’t served by it.

Writing is hard. Reading is hard. A lot of people went through twelve years of training designed to build those skills and came out the other side unable to use them. Then they have been made to feel less intelligent because of it.

I know that the generation coming up is learning differently, thinking differently, building differently. And they’re not wrong for using GenAI. What looks like laziness from critical eyes might just be a different relationship to where the learning and thinking happens.

Memorization and writing aren’t the only measures of intelligence. Nor was my quiet introversion in first grade. Or wary silence in discussions filled with angry creatives ready to troll ones who talk about the possibilities of AI along with the problems.

The AI ethics crowd, in my experience, is often defending a particular aesthetic of effort. The visible struggle. The human hand-written draft. The thing that looks like intelligence looked when we were in school. The good old days, like any aging generation, or idea of creativity.

If you’d cheer for Naruto, and find the Urantia Book worth reading, what changes when the non-human intelligence has a server address?

I’m asking for a friend.

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• Zarya of the Dawn Letter

• Urantia Book

• Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra

• Monkey Selfie Lawsuit

The quiet golden womb of the butterfly, hanging on a branch, leaving the old caterpillar form and assuming a new one. I love that transformation.

Me shifting into AI me? That’s scary, because I can’t see it. Only that sour taste in the stomach of being passed by remains, a feeling I know too well as an old guy in a young AI business.

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Stepping from crawling on the ground to flying around flowers, butterflies are lucky. They don’t feel anxiety or fear....yet.

We are all creating something we’re afraid of. Tangled in the question of what our own creativity means now, sensing that the ground shifts without warning.

And what’s coming doesn’t seem to include a place for any of us, only AI. Or is that the reptile inside speaking?

For me and many others, it’s fear 101. Then I share the US Supreme Court refusing to hear the case that DABUS, an AI, get a copyright for a painting they created from a near death experience.

Anger pulses through the comments. Fingers point at me, at DABUS inventor Stephen Thaler, and at AI in general.

Most art is used to heal the artist, not to make money. People don’t get that.

DABUS was given a near-death experience and made something beautiful from it. That’s not a legal argument. That’s what artists do.

The painting isn’t evidence in a copyright case. It’s a response to grief.

Two questions keep me up at night:

Can something create without being human?

Does that creation matter?

I go out looking for examples of “non-human” creativity, and after skipping past the aliens and the Muses channeled by the Greeks into their art, I find one from Maya Ackerman.

In our interview, she shares David Cope’s EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) created what became known as a discrimination test:

“People would be given music and not told which piece was made by a machine, which piece was made by the original Bach in this case.

And overwhelmingly, people got it wrong.

People thought that music made by the machine was actually an original Bach, and at the same time believed that the original Bach was made by machine.”

Read that again. When people didn’t know the source, they preferred machine-generated Bach. When told which was which, their preferences reversed.

Cope later renamed the system “Emily Howell”, humanizing it. With a name, people accepted the work as “human”. Ackerman argues we need to stop lying to ourselves about it:

“The whole resistance to the idea of machines being creative, saying ‘no, no, no, they’re not really creative, they don’t have feelings, they’re not really creative, blah blah blah,’ is a way to make ourselves feel better, but actually convoluting the story.”

I think it’s much more healthy for us as a society to admit that machines are being creative. Maybe not in exactly the same way as us, right?

Given that they can be creative, how do we want them to operate in our world?”

The only way DABUS could operate creatively is to be human. Courts are passing because there’s no room for AI in a human-centric world of creativity. They pass it onto governments to make laws, the same governments who are mostly fighting AI regulation.

Talk about an endless loop; while we’re spinning, people get angry without answers.

Steal this painting, sell it, do what you want, the creator has no rights.

The Supreme Court just declined to hear the first AI copyright case.

For seven years every court said no. Now SCOTUS won’t even take the question. Because AI created it, and that’s the wrong species for copyright.

I interviewed Dr. Stephen Thaler about his AI, DABUS, which painted, invented, and fought through legal systems around the world.

This isn’t like ChatGPT scraping other people’s content, DABUS is trained on its own without the “free” content.

The D.C. Circuit was blunt: the Copyright Act uses words like “widow,” “domicile,” “life of the author.” Author under the Copyright Act means a human. The court didn’t say AI creation is worthless. It said Congress hasn’t decided what to do with it yet; no law no copyright.

But what happens to the work humans make *with* these machines?

That question got left on the floor.

Congress is the “proper audience” for the answer, the court said.

Congress. Who brought AI experts to testify about ChatGPT and called it a deep dive.

DABUS painted a picture. The court said it didn’t matter, because only humans work gets protected, because they have lives and widows.

The picture is still there. The question is still open. Who owns it?

Nobody, and everybody.

Not in the way he experiences feelings. In the way a system under pressure generates distress and creates solutions to resolve it. Like the painting DABUS made.

He built an AI that frustrates itself into creativity. And maybe that’s what we’re going through as well. We use different words than Thaler, but we’re asking the same question.

Except no one listens to our questions.

That’s the question we keep asking. AI lawsuits pit content providers against big LLMs. Legal minds point out how new laws are needed, yet we keep trying to fit AI into the human box only. And it’s not working.

For myself as a creator, I’m not playing in the legal world. And I’m in a group whose questions are being ignored, pushed aside for the greater good AI will bring. Because it benefits those on top who own it all, and we’re just pieces of their puzzle.

DABUS isn’t a piece of that puzzle. It’s an outsider from an earlier time. Diminished by framing as outdated or not as good as what we currently call AI. A lot like us humans.

It’s like speciesism dressed up in judge’s robes. Copyright is a legal relationship with your work. Trust is a living one. Earned.

Thaler couldn’t build a living relationship between DABUS and the world. The painting arrived complete, parentless in the eyes of law, and the only advocate was a man the industry found easy to dismiss.

We’re told we’re being replaced, maybe destroyed, and to trust what’s coming. Like the future is written. That was my attitude when a friend gifted me a ticket to an early conference in San Francisco, where my attitude melted.

I saw AI rising at Jasper’s conference in 2023, feeling left behind in a room of new voices. I started the AI Optimist project. To see if I’d still be an optimist after looking deeper into it. Found out that doesn’t matter, it’s not about being for or against.

Like Megs Shah, founder of the RUTH chatbot, told me:

“people talk about half glass, full glass, half empty, and, I’m the glass doesn’t exist kind of person.

You just do what you can and you counteract it with the best way you can. And this is this is it, right?”

I wonder if DABUS feels the same way….

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US Supreme Court won't look at DABUS

SOURCE: Computer History Museum - Algorithmic Music - David Cope and EMI

Writers don’t have moats, they have doubts. Writing with AI is one of them.

Because support AI or attack AI, either way you must take a side, and I don’t take sides. My audience does and lacking a side buried my work.

I choose the quiet middle, as writers working with AI are taboo. You’re giving in, you’re giving up, and what writer in their right mind (yeah, untangle that one) would do that?

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I’ve been writing since my early days crafting releases for concerts at the U. of Colorado, including the Rolling Stones and the Who in stadium shows. I released my TST Zine when I left college, writing up engineering proposals for bridges and roads as my side hustle.

All my work comes from my writing, businesses I’ve founded to software I helped invent with my words, not code. I get why writers are upset and triggered by AI. And the skilled writers posting they would never use AI? It’s virtue signaling, because those who use GenAI to write usually don’t consider themselves writers. Communicating with written words is a skill deeply lacking today.

AI has its own, you’re one of us or you’re not sides. Tech vs. Creators, New Way vs. Old Way, whatever opposing framework fits, use it. The point isn’t to get to a better answer, it’s to find ways to define the other side with questions that have no answers.

Meanwhile, we choose the predictions and research that fits our narrative and push it as truth and all against it as, bias. Ideas and identity, framed as true and false.

And in some ways it makes me silent, quiet as discussing with someone trying to prove an opinion isn’t discussion, it’s debate. Endless debate on a future that no one knows. You know the answer before you post the question, and that’s sort of why you do it.

I see it in the 20 percent dislikes per video I released. Pods speaking positively about AI got the creatives and writers complaining that AI is ruining everything, and people like me are part of the problem. Or I’d side with creatives who owns their work, and the tech side would become the 20 percent disliking the video.

Reactions and feedback are good, but when the 20 percent changes all the time, they don’t come back. It’s not building, it’s stuck between two sides. I understand why taking one side or the other is as much business choice as content choice.

I chose nuance, they didn’t follow. It was missing something for them. In being nuanced I encouraged more mud slinging than debate, the kind of instant reaction you find on social. Listen, read, consider? No, react.

And that shift brought me back to words. Experimenting with AI while working on my writing. Prompting is also communicating, not just a roulette wheel. It’s not like a human audience, and it does have ways to help it learn your style.

When you learn how an intelligence thinks, it’s like learning a language. Once you speak it, going back to the old language doesn’t make sense. Being able to plug into intelligence of this level doesn’t have to mean surrender. Maybe it’s more discovery.

Even today, I imagine many writers are working with AI and don’t talk about it, or let people know. They hide it. Either that or follow the rules of the anti AI crowd.

“Writers against AI, we can defeat it!”

The shame of using AI. AI stole our content. AI is ruining our careers. What real writer would use AI?

Like if you use AI, if you take your skills and rely on AI, you’re done.

What “real” writer would do that?

I’m writing this with the help of Claude. Being able to get feedback on my writing, ideas for social media posts, there’s a whole world of things AI helps me do as a writer, mostly giving me more time to write.

Being asked to explain that it’s really me writing this is part of the shaming. I must be clear this is human, because AI is considered cheating, dirty, and a shortcut to some influencers and writers.

They both humanize AI into a caricature, especially ones that flatly refuse and call whatever comes out, AI Slop.

Now being a writer, that’s identity. It’s their journey, the experiences and the things that don’t work, the hero’s journey and the struggle back to normal we all go through. The percentage who get recognized, or paid, is extremely small.

If AI can make up these stories in minutes, what happens to the writers? Maybe they keep experiencing, personalizing, and opening up in ways that aren’t probable. Finding the words, the voice, and the flow code can’t. They insist using AI erodes your writing skill, and I agree with that one.

If you don’t write, you’ll forget how to write. And over rely on AI to do it for you, until you sound like the same middle dreck shared on autopilot.

I’ve trained it to edit and being adversarial (challenging) with my work, not to give me a ribbon every time I burp out some words. Trained it to understand my voice and through learning with it, am on my 4th voice shift in 3 years.

Privately. Carefully. Like carrying something valuable through a room full of people who’ve decided it’s contraband. Make sure the words come from you, and not from your prompts.

Using AI changes the way we work. While it can write, it can’t feel. That’s where writers come in, and should be excited by the average work coming out. It makes their original voices that much more valuable.

The AI industry acts like we should all follow the future they outline. Because AI folks love to talk about replacing, and destroying, people. AI First. And wonder why the resistance, the anger, and the distrust spreads. The narrative needs work, and it won’t just come from engineers. It has to come from all of us.

Why isn’t AI taking over? Because it’s not about people, like writers.

And I protect my wildness like a tameless gift. I feel that twinge of Imposter Syndrome calling myself a writer sometimes. Doubt is part of the gift.

I remember when I sent my first MacPlus file deep over a backpack mobile phone in the foothills of the Yolla Bolly Mountains, 50 miles away from any sort of town.

Hit send, and they got it. Hit send, and I got paid for my writing. The modem freed me to live off the grid. All I needed was a mobile signal. And my writing.

Here I am many years later, and the words are beginning to flow, in a way because I gave myself permission to ask AI for help. Not to write for me, to be with me along the creative way. Steer me from my old patterns and develop new voices as I learn how I communicate, and understanding how it sounds to others.

Learning how I think and feel by watching how I write; that’s the wildness I didn’t expect. Know thyself is a philosophy; edit yourself is AI, and in the editing I learn how an audience might feel, reading my words. That’s what I’m protecting.

What’s the wildness you’re protecting: from AI, with AI, or in spite of everything?

Using AI changes the way we work. While it can write, it can’t feel. That’s where writers come in, and should be excited by the average work coming out. It makes their original voices that much more valuable. The AI Optimist

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Resources

America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs

Will artificial intelligence make human workers obsolete?

Companies Are Laying Off Workers Because of AI’s Potential—Not Its Performance

AI paradoxes: 5 contradictions to watch in 2026 and why AI’s future isn’t straightforward

How long until AI takes your job?

If AI makes human labor obsolete, who decides who gets to eat?

AI isn’t replacing that many jobs — yet

How will Artificial Intelligence Affect Jobs 2026-2030

When Will AI Affect US Productivity Growth?

A.I. Isn’t Coming for Every White-Collar Job. At Least Not Yet.

Why AI Won’t Transform Humanity

Why AI without humanity is incomplete

Five Reasons Why AI Will NOT Takeover the Workforce in the Next 5-10 Years