I was at a party a while back when the conversation turned toward AI. A financially well-off fellow I’d just met told me how he’d given thank you letters to his best clients. He went on to boast that, while he handwrote out and signed his name to each of those thank you letters, he had ChatGPT write the actual words to the letters for him.
That didn’t sit well with me.
One-hundred fifty years ago, on March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the world’s first ever telephone call, but it took 75 discerning years for his invention to reach 100 million users. When the automobile came out, it took 33 years to gain 100 million users. The cell phone took 15 years for its first 100 mil, and the internet conquered the feat in seven years.
It took ChatGPT 60 days.
That mark was reached three years ago this month. And now the thing is everywhere, with about a billion users (and growing) relying on it for more and more things with greater and greater devotion. In three years — out of the 300,000-plus years of us homo sapiens walking on two legs around this word — that thing has changed the way we live and think and do.
And I don’t think that’s good.
It is 2026, and there’s no iota of a shred of a doubt that we are in the AI Era. It’s here, and it’s here to stay. But while it took thousands of years for us to go from stone to bronze to iron, it is precisely the quickness of the adoption of AI that should give us pause. Things are happening like a lightning-strike and only getting faster. It is 2026, and we all wake up and brush our teeth in a technological arms race of instant, instanter, and instantest without any idea if what is being shoved down our metaphoric throat is good for us or bad for us or just for the profit of the few.
What was wrong and what needed fixing? What’s the AI end-game? What, in 2026, does it mean to be human?
In so many facets of our human lives that weren’t broken four years ago, we are now being told (even forced) to “leverage the power of AI” in order to do things faster. But if everyone in a race starts speeding up at the same pace, everyone in that race is still going the same relative speed. Nothing is gained.
And when we start going faster just for the sake of going faster, things get lost. Learning gets lost. Texture gets lost. Wisdom gets lost. Where this seems most troublesome for our humanity, to me, at this stage, is with our written words.
Less than three years since the unveiling of large language models (LLMs), our culture now uses the machines to write (or “improve”) everything from our emails to our essays to our web copy to our songs to our books; our lesson plans, grocery lists, workout regimens, text messages, and, yes, thank you letters.
And let us not forget that true writing is rewriting — that it is in our editing, our reworking, our drafting, our human honing where we really get to know what it is we are trying to say and how we are trying to say it.
It is 2026, and I encourage us human beings to return to writing our own writing. Because if we don’t, like any language that is no longer practiced, we will one day lose the ability to do so. And when we human beings lose our ability to write, it is our ability to think, to figure out problems, to find creative solutions, to be human, that will wither and fade.
AI is here and it’s not going to go away. It will grow more astronomically powerful and more absolutely pervasive within our everyday existence. With access to it in our pockets, we human beings have essentially become cyborgs. Yet we are not meant to live as cyborgs, but as human beings.
So let us live like human beings. And a good way to make sure we do that is to get back to writing our own writing.
