And that, I think, is the part many people still refuse to understand. We keep asking whether artificial intelligence will replace humans, whether ChatGPT is good enough, whether AI-generated content is obvious, whether it hallucinates too much, and whether this is just another technological bubble waiting to burst. But those questions are increasingly missing the point.
AI is already here. It is becoming a normal part of everyday work, much like the internet once did, followed by smartphones and countless other technologies we initially treated as optional.
Of course, we can still wave it away and say that ChatGPT hallucinates, that AI-generated texts can be spotted from a mile away, and that no algorithm will ever truly replace a human being. All of that may even be true. But it misses the point. We are not competing with artificial intelligence. We are competing with people who know how to use it better than we do.
Someone who once needed two hours to complete a certain task may now be able to do it in twenty minutes. Not because they suddenly became ten times smarter overnight, but because they know how to use a tool that takes care of routine work and leaves them more time to think. If someone can achieve more in the same amount of time, find information faster and extract more value from it, then the number of years of experience we have suddenly becomes much less important.
That does not mean we should trust AI blindly. Quite the opposite. The more we use it, the more important our own knowledge becomes, because we need to be able to tell a good answer from complete nonsense. But rejecting artificial intelligence simply because we have managed perfectly well without it until now makes about as much sense as saying twenty years ago that we did not need the internet because we already had a telephone and a fax machine.
Perhaps the biggest misconception right now is the belief that we still have plenty of time. That we can take another look at AI in a year or two, once everything is more mature and we can see where things are heading.
By then, some people will already be two years ahead of us. That is precisely why the saying “If you don’t keep up with the times, the times will leave you behind” sounds much less like a proverb today and much more like a warning.
