AI Could Never Be You

1 day ago

6 min read

Cover photo: Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels

The Fear

As a kid, you probably never thought that Siri was going to take your job. After all, she's just a voice in your phone that sets timers, plays songs and mishears your questions. However, now we hear of AI just like Siri answering calls, taking orders and maybe next, taking our jobs.

For many Americans that fear is knocking at their doors, with a whopping 70% believing that AI will reduce job opportunities. Among working Americans, 30% now worry their own jobs could become obsolete, up from about 1 in 5 just a year earlier (Quinnipiac, March 2026). For adults aged 18 to 34, that fear hits much closer to home, with 27% saying they or someone they know has already lost work to AI (Axios and Generation Lab).

Whether you are just about to graduate, starting a family, or just starting off your career, these numbers can make the future feel pointless.

But the actual data tells a different story.

The Reality Check

Researchers at Stanford found that for workers most at risk of AI job displacement, unemployment has risen less than one percentage point since 2022. That is actually a smaller rise than for the workers least exposed to AI. Goldman Sachs estimates that around 15 million US workers could be displaced over the next ten years. This is worrying news, but it is also an opportunity to act, because the change won't happen overnight.

Still, the change is real. Entry level roles are getting squeezed out of the market, because those are the tasks companies rush to automate first. At X, formerly Twitter, Elon Musk reportedly cut half of an engineering team so their work could be handed over to the company's AI, Grok. Managers and executives everywhere are betting that AI can do the work faster and cheaper. But many are discovering something blaringly obvious: you cannot fire the people who understand the work and still expect the work to get done.

And some companies learned that lesson in the most humiliating way.

Klarna froze hiring and bragged that its AI was doing the work of 700 customer service agents, celebrating it as the new customer relations frontier. Customers quickly got frustrated, because bots can't do nuance. Klarna's CEO later admitted that cost had been “a too predominant evaluation factor,” and the company started hiring people to fill the same roles they thought AI would do so well.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia replaced 45 call center workers with an AI voice bot. And of course, call volumes went up, because the bot could not keep up. The bank called the decision an “error” and quickly reversed it.

IBM cut thousands of jobs trying to push deeper into the forefront of the AI workforce. Guess what? In February, it announced it would triple entry level hiring for, in its own words, “all these jobs we're being told AI can do.”

Every time they tried to replace the people, their customers asked for the people to come back.

Let's be real: even AI needs people. AI learns from what we humans make. From our words they create stories, from our pictures they create new images, from our music they piece together new songs, and from our mistakes they learn what they can be. When AIs are trained on content mostly made by other AI, they get worse over time. This feedback loop creates what researchers call model collapse. Without fresh human inspiration and ideas, the machine starts copying copies until there is nothing left to say.

No people, no data. No data, no AI.

It's Not Just Jobs. It's Talent.

The fears don’t just stop at spreadsheets, the humanities are under threat as well. The things that tell our story, the trials and triumphs of humanity, our art, our music, our voice.

AI music has begun flooding streaming platforms. AI ads are popping up everywhere, and most of them feel uncanny at best, and a waste of drinking water at worst. And then there’s the AI flyer epidemic. You know the one. Too many colors, too much shine, a font that’s yelling at you, and somehow, after all that noise, it says everything and nothing at all.

That flyer tells you everything you need to know. AI can make something look impressive, but it cannot give the information on the flyer meaning.

I am a poet, an artist, and a fashion designer, so I feel this one personally. When AI makes something, it can look amazing. But it's missing something. The real-life inspiration, the fleeting touch of time, the memories in our stories. It does not understand the depths of our joy, the grasp of our pains, or the truth that lives on in the imperfections we often try to hide in our most vulnerable moments.

We hide those moments in an effort to be perfect for others. But it is only when we let life happen that we become real. In the real is where our humanity stops being just a concept and becomes a flaming light shining in the sky for all of history to see.

AI can only reflect our light, giving us a mere taste of what we have to offer. Even when it creates, it can only rearrange what has already been done, take the same old thing, and put a new bow on it. It can replicate a moment, but it did not live it.

Humans can be.

Every day you live, something new happens. New context arrives, new stories are born, new moments are lived that nobody could have imagined, because nothing existed yet to imagine them from. Then they happen, and you see them, and you realize they always were, and always will be.

You will see your story with your own eyes. You will know what you felt, how strange and beautiful it was to be part of the human experience, never knowing what comes next, only living it and then telling it. You might tell that story to an AI someday. But it did not go through it. It cannot understand it.

The Human Premium

Here's some good news: people can feel the difference, and they are willing to pay for it.

Researchers at Columbia Business School found that when art was shown side by side, people valued art labeled as AI made 62% less than art labeled as human made. In a 2026 survey, 68% of Americans picked a human made product over an identical AI made one at the same price, and more than half said they would pay more for human made. Buyers have already started skipping AI generated designs in online marketplaces, and labels like “Made by Human” are showing up on products and creative work.

The more the world fills up with AI made content, the more valuable the human touch becomes. Scarcity creates value, and real human stories are becoming the rarest thing online.

Do Your Heart's Desire

So what can you do with all of this?

Apply for that job. If that is what your heart wants, go for it, because companies are learning they still need people like you.

Or maybe don't. You have been sitting on a vibrant painting, a melodious song, an iconic clothing line, a gripping book of poems or even an innovative business idea that only makes sense to you right now. Start today! AI cannot tell your story. It does not know where you come from, what you survived, or what you dream about at 2 a.m. Bring your imagination from the ether into reality. I want to witness it.

The future will bring changes none of us can fully predict. Yes, the job market will shift. Nothing can stay the same forever. But no matter what happens, there is one thing no machine will ever take from you.

You.