I typed a sentence into a box this spring and a machine drew me a picture, and I have not quite been the same since.
I want to describe the actual feeling, because it seems worth writing down before hindsight arrives and tidies it into a story. It was not fear. It was closer to vertigo — the particular dizziness of watching a floor you were standing on turn out to be a lift.
It is not good yet, and I want to be honest about that. The hands are wrong. It cannot spell. It does not know what it is looking at, only what tends to sit near what. Ask it for something specific and it hands you something adjacent, and never seems to notice the gap.
But I have been at this long enough to know that arguing with the state a thing is in today rarely gets you very far. The question was never how good is it right now. The question is how fast it is improving, and where it will have landed by the time you are done doubting it.
Here is what I keep circling back to. It has taken the part of the work I could always do and made it cheap. It has not touched the part I have spent twenty years trying to be good at. It can produce endlessly, in any style, in seconds. It cannot tell you which one is right, or why, or what to leave out, or what a particular business actually needs.
It has made execution nearly free and made judgment worth more. I don't know yet whether that is good news or hard news for the work I do. Probably some of both, and probably not spread evenly.
Either way, the floor is moving. I would rather stay curious about it than frightened. I have never once seen fear make a good decision in this line of work.