This isn’t a rant. I use AI every day. It’s in almost everything I build. I’m not going to tell you to go back to something — there’s nothing to go back to.
But I’ve been paying attention to what people are actually hungry for lately, and it keeps pointing at the same gap.
Not information. Not answers. Not productivity. Everyone has more of that than they can process.
What people are hungry for is the experience of being genuinely responded to. Not pattern-matched. Not predicted. Actually heard — by someone who had to choose to be present, who could have been somewhere else, who has their own stake in the outcome.
AI is very good at response. It’s not possible for it to have stake. And I think we’re starting to feel the difference, even when we can’t name it.
There’s a reason the dinners land the way they do. It’s not the food or the venue. It’s that everyone in the room chose to be there when they could have been doing something easier. That choice is legible. It does something to the texture of a conversation that no amount of production value can replicate.
I don’t think AI takes human connection. I think it makes the real thing more visible by contrast. When everything is optimized for output, the unoptimized interaction stands out. When every surface is smooth, rough is interesting.
What we’re trading away is the friction that used to force presence. The wait, the distance, the limits. Those limits produced intimacy because they required effort from both sides.
I’m not nostalgic for inefficiency. But I’m paying attention to what disappears with it.