Some of my thoughts on AI:

  • Holy F–king Shit. What the F–k is all of this?! 
  • Oh, shit, it’s everywhere. What the f–k!
  • Oh my God. Oh no. Oh no.
  • Why can’t I just go to a website? I hate this. Who is doing this? Who wants this?
  • Hey, that was kind of cool.
  • Jesus, God, no! You’ve ruined everything…

Alright, look. AI has been making headlines across business and entertainment hemispheres for years now, and you can’t trek through your favorite internet haunting grounds without stumbling on some form of hastily fastened AI integration. And as much as I’ll be the first to make a Luddite-coded dig at AI evangelists, I actually co-chair a committee at my agency with the explicit charge of guiding and promoting AI adoption across workflows and departments. 

I think AI is—and will ultimately end up—a net positive, but for every instance where I see AI enabling some never-before-dreamed level of creative possibility, I also see it callously aimed at the wrong thing, replacing productivity where heart used to be. I use it all the time, but then go out of my way to avoid using it for the stuff I think matters the most. I dunno. I guess what I’m saying is AI is, like, fine? Hot take city.

Anyway, you can YouTube a gaggle of techsperts with way more knowledge and authority to deliver cogent advice on how best to adopt facets of AI into your personal and professional life, so I’m not going to attempt any of that. I mean, this post started with a six-bullet, expletive-laden list of doomsaying, so you weren’t going to listen to anything I said on the topic anyway. What I will do is share a notion that I don’t hear mentioned often when the subject of AI is brought up: We should probably be talking to our parents about all of this.

Having the conversation with the folks.

I, for one, have a wonderful ritual that takes place around holidays each year where I non-non-chalantly rattle off all of that year’s popular online scams. Identity theft robocalls, phishing emails, awkwardly one time a warning about catfishing from fake cougar-hunting hunks on dating websites. You know–whatever the desperate Nigerian prince du jour is. Well this year it’s going to be a not-so-subtle deep dive on the veracity of AI-generated content. It’s pervasive, and devious, and sometimes intended specifically to fool a generation that grew up with rotary phones into falsified narratives that cost the deceived money or sanity. It’s our duty to use our marginally-more attuned digital savvy to help the ones we love develop better defensive mechanisms. Is trying to articulate to my mother just how many em-dashes it takes to prove those Facebook posts are Russian propaganda bots a little more difficult than “don’t buy that online stranger five-hundred dollars of physical Best Buy gift cards?” Yeah, but I love her.

So yeah, no profound thinkpiece of AI’s place among human innovation here. Just a reminder that technology often impacts legacy generations with a sharper edge. This coming from a guy that thinks the N64 was probably our technological apex and just wants his damn flying car.