It’s astonishing how deftly we transform the technological short-circuiting of our own certainties into a touching tale of “opportunity.”
We sit in cafés with laptops, generating texts, images, and code that five years ago would have earned us degrees — and we say: Finally, I’m free. I don’t need to know anything anymore. I just need to ask.
Meanwhile, all the famous institutes — and even magazines that stopped writing about AI’s negative aspects (because it’s unfashionable, doesn’t match today’s missile barrage, and most importantly, doesn’t please the enthusiastic gurus) — keep building new nuclear warheads. So even the staunchest critic sees only endless bliss and eternal glory for those methodologists who excel at praising themselves on social media and in public.
To ask — that’s the new meta-skill.
To formulate questions for entities that have no concept of a question, because they merely calculate the probability of the next token. And we stand in awe before the fountain we ourselves filled with our own work, marvelling at its wisdom.
Survival Mechanisms of Castaways
Glaze, Mist, Nightshade — names that sound like spells from a fantasy novel. Magic runes meant to protect creators from the dragon. We inject noise into images, invisible to the human eye but supposedly detectable by machines. It’s meant to be our One Ring, our invisibility. But the dragon doesn’t stand still. While we draw invisible dots, it grows — training on billions of parameters, devouring libraries, galleries, discographies. And when the day comes that our “hostile injections” stop working, and it arrives, we’ll be able to say: At least we tried.
Yes. It’s exactly like saving a house from a flood by rearranging the cushions on the couch while the water rises. Some of our fellow citizens are better at it — they grab the salami and climb a tree.
Schools and Academic Institutions: A Temple of Knowledge That No Longer Knows
With touching solemnity, academic senates draft guidelines on the ethical use of generative AI. Students may use AI for “formal editing,” but not for “content creation.” As if we were separating water from a dam. As if we were asking students to breathe, but not oxygen. And the most beautiful part? The complete transfer of responsibility. The school declares: The student bears full responsibility for the submitted work.
Of course. Just like a person in 2026 bears full responsibility for occasionally processing an ad that flashes from a billboard. AI is everywhere — in our phones, emails, search engines, text editors, and even the app we use to order lunch. But during exams, please turn it off. Disconnect from the matrix for two hours, then dive back in.
It’s like banning the use of levers when lifting stones. You can — but only if no one sees you. And if you’re caught, we’ll send you to the gym to strengthen muscles no one needs anymore.
Fifty and a Fresh Start (they say)
Millions are expected to “professionally reinvent” themselves. Picture the scene:
An electrician who’s pulled cables for thirty years sits at a computer to learn “prompt engineering.” His wife, an accountant, discovers that Excel now writes formulas on its own. Their daughter, a graphic designer, sends out portfolios where it’s unclear where her hand ends and the algorithm begins. And the miner who was just laid off becomes a time management expert — and in the age of LGBT inclusion, may need to wear a skirt just to get hired by a modern corporate firm.
And we call this a structural shift. Not the liquidation of professions. Not the expropriation of skills.
We once had guilds, apprenticeships, and years of practice. Today, we have YouTube tutorials and OpenAI subscriptions. And if someone dares to say this path leads to emptiness, they’re quickly silenced with the label neo-Luddite. Because everyone knows that smashing looms in the 19th century didn’t help. The weavers disappeared anyway.
But we’re not weavers. We’re everyone. And today, you don’t smash looms — you smash software. Except you don’t. Because software is everywhere and nowhere. It’s in the air.
Open Letters to Doors That Closed Long Ago
Christie’s auctions machine-made art. Artists write petitions. They call it mass theft. And they’re right.
But theft assumes a thief who knows he’s stealing. The algorithm knows nothing. It’s the most perfect tool we’ve ever created — perfectly amoral, perfectly efficient, perfectly stupid in the most terrifying sense.
Artists weep when they see AI generate the movement of corpses. They say it’s an insult to life itself.
But we no longer live in a world where insults are taken seriously. We live in a world where insults are monetized. Where ethical codes are written to be referenced, not followed.
Meanwhile, data centres cool servers with water that could irrigate an entire village — just to generate a picture of a cat in a hat.
Executive Summary for Those Who Didn’t Finish Reading
The future isn’t something that happens. It’s something we order.
And we’ve ordered a world where it’s easier to let a machine write (calculate) a poem than to write one ourselves. Where it’s normal for a chatbot to offer advice at the first hint of creative block. Where studying the humanities becomes an act of pure defiance — or naivety.
And the most ironic part? This bitter, sarcastic, alarmed text was written on a device that doesn’t work without AI, in an editor that uses AI, and you’re reading it on a network woven with AI like a bloodstream.
There is no outside. We’re not observers. We’re material.
So let’s continue. Write petitions. Glaze images. Learn to prompt.
And above all — never stop believing that a paper umbrella will hold back a wave that already washed away the island. And the real strike hasn’t even begun…
Because the one thing a tsunami can’t wash away is our ability to pretend nothing happened.
Amen.
PS: There’s only one form of defence: common sense — the one inside each of us.
Sadly, even that seems to be missing in some of these discussions. Oh well…
If you'd like, I can help adapt this into a stylized manifesto, a blog post, or even a visual teaser.