AI is everywhere right now, and it feels sudden. But it isn't. The field has been developing since the 1950s. Alan Turing was giving lectures about machine intelligence as early as 1947, and the term "artificial intelligence" was formally coined at a Dartmouth workshop in 1956. There were decades of slow progress, funding droughts, and "AI winters," periods where hype outpaced results and investment dried up entirely. What we're seeing now is more like a dam breaking.
The difference is computational power and data. Modern AI runs on GPUs that can process billions of parameters simultaneously, trained on effectively the entire internet. ChatGPT crossed one million users in five days. OpenAI's latest image generation can now edit a specific object in a photo without regenerating the whole thing, something that wasn't possible a year ago. The tools are getting better, fast, and that pace isn't slowing down.
I get why people are tired of it.
Every app has an AI feature now, most of which nobody asked for. Companies are cutting headcount and pointing to AI as the reason. The LinkedIn posts and captions people are seeing sound like they were written by the same bland ghost. And they kind of were. When the most visible version of a technology is corporations using it to do more with less and individuals using it to skip the thinking entirely, of course the response is fatigue.
But the version people are seeing isn't the whole story.
The slop isn't a technology problem. It's a taste problem. The people generating it didn't suddenly become lazy because AI showed up. They were already outsourcing their thinking wherever they could. AI just made that faster and more visible. What you put in determines what comes out. If you bring no opinions and no discernment, you get generic output. That was always going to be the result.
I use AI every day. I use it to build faster, to move ideas from my head to the screen without getting stuck on implementation. I used to spend hours trying to get an animation exactly right, or settle for something that was close enough but not quite what I pictured. I have strong aesthetic opinions and weaker CSS skills. Now I can describe what I want and get there. AI handles the execution while the vision stays mine.
It also works as a thinking partner. I'll bring a half-formed idea and push back on it, ask it to argue the other side, use it to pressure-test something before I decide. But I don't let it decide. There's a question I ask myself when I reach for it: does this actually require AI, or am I just delegating because I can? Sometimes the answer is no. The tool is powerful enough that you have to be intentional about when it's actually useful versus when it's just friction-avoidance.
And then there are things I won't use it for at all. Anything that requires my actual perspective. Anything where the human touch is the point. I'm not using AI to have conversations or replace the relationships in my life. That's a trade I'm not willing to make.
Last month I ran a background agent in Cursor for the first time. Cursor spins up a cloud environment, clones your repo, works on a dedicated branch, and opens a pull request when the task is done. Your laptop doesn't even need to be on. I sent a task before I went to bed and woke up to a PR waiting for review. Cursor now reports that 35% of its own internal merged PRs are created this way.
That's a meaningful shift in what a single developer can do, and it's happening inside normal workflows now, not just in demos. It's also why the "I don't use AI" stance is getting harder to hold.
AI is embedding itself into the infrastructure of how work gets done, whether you find it cool or not. The people who understand how these tools work — where they fail and how to tell good output from bad — are going to have a real advantage over people who've opted out of the conversation entirely.
The part that actually worries me isn't the slop. It's what comes next.
OpenAI's image generation already produces results that are genuinely hard to distinguish from photos. That's going to get harder to detect, not easier. There's almost no federal regulation in the U.S. Seeing is no longer believing, and the tools for knowing what's real are not keeping pace with the tools for making things that aren't.
You don't have to love AI or use it. The fatigue makes sense, and I feel it sometimes too. Checking out when the consumer-facing version gets exhausting is tempting. It also leaves you less equipped to navigate what's already coming.
The answer isn't to stay ignorant of it. It's to understand it well enough to have discernment about what's happening and why.