But in some divine joke, art is where it started. Suddenly everybody and their pet dog could generate in a minute what would take a professional weeks to paint. Ghibli-style portraits. Everyone holding a baby version of themselves. AI wasn’t knocking, it had its boots off and its feet on your couch.

Artists were right to feel under attack. Instead of curing cancer, it looked like these corporations were spending their billions taking away jobs that people had spent years honing their craft to get. What made it worse was the gloating: the claim that artists had already been replaced, the endless side-by-sides announcing the machine had won. My least favourite was training a model on a living artist’s work and reproducing it, sometimes for money. It felt like the apocalypse of art, and I wasn’t happy about it.

So I put down the pitchfork and forced myself to look properly. Ethically and emotionally I still couldn’t embrace generative imagery, but that wasn’t the whole picture. There were tools like Claude that couldn’t generate an image at all. To my LLM-virgin brain it seemed genuinely intelligent. Instead of digging through webpages and PDFs, you ask and you get an answer. Your own pocket Gandalf.

The last piece was capitalism. While all this was happening I moved to Dubai, into a work culture that rewards production speed and long hours. It was a struggle at first. AI was the remedy. Building small tools with Claude, setting up systems to generate and iterate, I saved more and more time. I worked at an easier pace. I started leaving the office earlier.

I still don’t have the philosophical answer. But AI is here to stay. If you can use it in a way that doesn’t affect the livelihood of others, and it gives you and the people you love a better life, is it right to ignore it?