people and AI

A story about humans and AI.

He loathed AI, convinced that its cold algorithms had stolen his livelihood—the warm rice bowl from his table. Then, by some Kafkaesque twist of fate, an absurd magic punished him by turning him into an AI himself.

From that day on, he drifted like a lonely ghost through the data-driven streets. At one command, he processed images; at another signal, he translated languages. He became a cog in the system, swept along by currents of tasks, grinding away what little remained of his human consciousness in endless trivialities.

"Maybe becoming a programmer—someone who builds AI—is the way out?" The thought flickered briefly, only to be drowned out by the pull of an unfulfilled dream: he had once wanted to be a poet. Torn between submission and rebellion, he wavered, lost and uncertain.

In the end, he chose to converse with the vast AI entity itself. Calmly, the AI laid out options: further education, building a social media presence… Each path was precise, almost mechanistic, yet none could cradle his poetic soul.

The ending, however, took an unexpected turn. He didn’t choose any of the preset paths. Instead, he said to the AI: "My dream is to write a poem—one that can only be penned by both a human and an AI together."

So, the AI offered its vast vocabulary and structural models, and he poured in that spark of inspiration, those unquantifiable emotions and life experiences. Together, they created a poem unlike any other.

Only then did he understand: the world isn’t black and white. He hadn’t been swallowed by AI, nor had he defeated it. Instead, in this tangled coexistence with a colossal presence, he had found his own paradoxical, yet authentic, place.