1

Opening the front door I lift my bike into the house and am met by my son waddling over. He’s not quite two and saying new words every day. I’ve spent all day in the laptop and have a headache. He and his Mum are mixing pancake batter on the kitchen floor. I ask for a hug to check he’s real and I pay close attention as I bury my face in his chest. I ask my partner if she’s real too and she jokes that she’s AI.

2

It’s a few evenings previous and I knock on my neighbours door to collect a package they’ve rescued for me. We know each other well enough to get past pleasantries quickly and into what’s actually going on. He’s a software developer; a good one, with a particular interest in accessibility.

With a dreariness to match the rain he tells me how he’s fallen out of love with his job. In the space of a year he’s gone from someone who actively solves puzzles through elegant code to someone who mindlessly checks the output of a bot.

We suggest that maybe we should just pack it in and make art instead, although he confesses he can’t remember how.

3

My partner and I watch Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and I instantly fall in love with the artwork. I’m comforted that there is already so much human made art that perhaps I can just spend my future discovering films from the past.

On seeing early AI animation, Hayao Miyazaki said;

“I feel like we are nearing to the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”

4

Around 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks are now uploaded to Deezer every day. That’s 34% of all daily uploads. I take heart that they at least tag these as AI generated for transparency but Spotify, who have 31.7% market share to Deezer’s 1.3%, aren’t doing so.

5

My friend buys me a zine from East Bristol Books called Looking for Luddites by John Hewitt, in which he sketches locations associated with the Luddite uprisings of 1812. Page 1; Enoch Taylor’s grave. Enoch Taylor ran a forge producing textile finishing machines “each replacing the labours of ten time-served artisans with cheaper, inferior-quality goods.”

The epilogue reads, “The Luddites performed desperate acts of resistance, not so much against machines, but against the consequential loss of security, status and self-determination in the workplace and society.”

6

I stop listening to Lenny’s Podcast because it’s mainly become AI evangelists gloating that they’ve managed to cut 8.8 humans out of their ‘team’.

7

ChatGPT helps me change a tap and I feel like I can fix anything now! Then I realise I didn’t call a plumber.

8

Me and a couple of friends play Arc Raiders. We squad up, go ‘topside’ and get into scrapes. We have a WhatsApp group and I make an AI generated image of the three of us in the art style of the game. It looks badass. The AI has given me a sharper jawline and grizzled features and my partner says I look hot.

9

Issue #376 of Dense Discovery drops into my inbox. Subject: “Coding: from craft to commodity”. It suggests that software development “is having its assembly line moment” and that “coding is transforming from craft to manufacture, from bespoke tailoring to fast fashion”.

This echoes true for the experiences I’ve already had coding with AI, both as a part-time developer and a full-time designer. I think of all the times I’ve heard the word craft associated with product design, and the pride, care and commitment we’ve taken in developing standards of quality. I’m saddened at how quickly we seem to be discarding that for the same old narrative that more is better.

I put a question mark next to ‘outcomes over output’ on my mental list of Product catchphrases.

10

My Grandpa was a fine furniture maker and committed craftsman. I once asked him if he ever wanted to sell his work and he had no urge. It’s value was what he deemed it to be. He was utterly content working away in his workshop with ClassicFM on. His furniture is only found in the private collections of his friends’ and family’s homes. Dinners are eaten at them, treasured belongings are stored in them, blog posts are written whilst sat on them.

11

My partner Helena is a successful theatre director who, in an underfunded, underappreciated industry brings joy, drama and reflections on life to audiences. I remind her that it’s a tragedy of free-market capitalism that economically my work is rewarded so much more than hers. As passionate as I am about my job, a full life depends on the richness of art much more than the quality of its digital products.

We ponder that if her and her peers can hang on in there, perhaps theatre’s time is coming. Perhaps the oversaturation of AI slop will lead to a societal re-evaluation of the importance of human made art - and reward it accordingly. Perhaps it’ll be my work that’ll become less consistent and backed by government grants or philanthropic patrons.

12

I sit quietly in my local coffee shop that is also a wine bar. My preferred seat is next to the wall of bottles curated by the resident wine aficionado. Their labels are visually bold and varied and I imagine all these designers at laptops like mine making strong artistic choices. It’s inspiring and I photograph a couple for future reference.

Before I finish my coffee I realise that if these were generated by AI I wouldn’t care about them anymore. Then I realise I can’t be sure they’re not. My coffee tastes bitter. I choose to assume they’re real.

13

I sit in another coffee shop. This one is particularly studious this morning. The student next to me asks her friend how she should reference AI in her essay.

14

We watch Train Dreams, a poignant film following the life of a logger in Idaho during the fast-changing world of the early 20th century. Sitting around the fire one of the older workers reflects on the impact that chopping down trees has on a man’s soul. Everything is finely balanced; interconnected.

That melancholic thought stays with us as the workers spend weeks sawing through huge trunks, feeling the resistance of every tree. They can’t avoid the brutality of the act. They are forced to confront their place in the ecosystem.

Later our now ageing protagonist is replaced by a chainsaw. Trees fall with ruthless efficiency and relative discomfort. They hardly break a sweat.

15

I use Cursor to help make a client site. Leaning on structures and best practises I’d implemented by hand previously I’m impressed by how much it speeds up the process. It’s a breeze. My client gets a higher-quality site, running on more modern architecture, all within the same budget.

I learn nothing other than how to prompt Cursor well.

16

I’m shocked to discover that Headspace, an app that I’ll always be grateful to for giving me an accessible entry into meditation, has released an AI mental health companion. It feels utterly misplaced. Mindfulness is the practice of observing reality to cultivate compassion for the uncomfortable experience of it all - not to outsource that work to a seductive simulacrum of empathy.

Miyazaki’s words echo in my ear; “We humans are losing faith in ourselves”.

17

I take part in a roundtable discussion with my local MP about the harms of social media to under-16s. I suggest that we’re about ten years too late discussing this - the harms have been blindingly obvious for years to anyone who wasn’t interested in buying Big Tech’s propaganda. I make the case that we still have a chance to be more proactive on the roll out of AI chatbots.

My MP is well meaning but I don’t think she understands the difference between algorithmic and generative AI, and the conversation moves on.

18

The Centre for Humane Technology have a conversation with researcher and author Dr. Zak Stein on the emergence of the attachment economy; “systems designed to exploit our most fundamental psychological vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale.”

“Human relationships are how we develop resilience, learn to regulate emotions, and maintain mental health. When you replace those relationships with AI interactions, you’re not getting the genuine reciprocity, the reality-testing, the growth that comes from navigating real human connection.”

As with the attention economy, if AI companions follow the same engagement-maximising time-on-platform incentives then addiction and attachment is inevitable. We risk “replacing human connection with machine simulation”.

Of the potential dystopias available to us this is the one I most fear, and the one that I think is most likely.

I listen to the episode of Your Undivided Attention as I do the washing up.

19

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson once said;

“We have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology”

That fact is never far from my Palaeolithic prefrontal cortex.

20

My birthday passes and I’m grateful that I was born at a time when I had the space to develop my own sense of self without the profoundly tempting crutch of an always-available, ultra-validating chatbot.

I have the ability to move between self-regulation and co-regulation with my loved ones as required (albeit not always easily). I know the discomfort of human relationships to be an intrinsic part of understanding myself and accepting others. This discomfort is not an inconvenience to be solved.

I wonder what opportunity my son will have to discover that.

21

After reading some bedtime books we lie on the sofa bed, looking at the colourful stars dancing across his ceiling. The bed is pulled out because he hasn’t been sleeping so well lately. I’m exhausted but it’s peaceful. He rests his head on my chest and together we watch the stars go round and round and round and round and round.