The AI Paradox: A Tool, Not a Terminator

I've been thinking about artificial intelligence a lot lately — mostly because I've been using it every single day for the past several months, and what I've discovered doesn't match what I keep hearing from everyone else.

Here's what I know: AI has come further in the last two years than in the decade before it. And in the last six months alone? Miraculous isn't too strong a word.

Here's what I also know: I'm not afraid of Skynet.

Don't get me wrong — I've seen the Terminator. Multiple times. But the scenario that keeps me up at night isn't a machine deciding to take over the world. It's people. Specifically, people who haven't kept their common sense current with their technology. And lately, people aren't exactly impressing me in that department.

What I've found in my own experience is something different from the doom and gloom. I'm a fantasy author building a universe — dragons, desert kingdoms, a 23-year-old cat who inspired a character who hoards donuts. I'm also a one-woman operation running a store, writing blog posts, managing social media, and trying to remember where I put my coffee.

AI didn't replace any of that. It became my Della Street.

If you've never watched Perry Mason, Della Street was his secretary — competent, sharp, always three steps ahead, never rattled. Perry Mason was brilliant, but he needed Della to function. I've always thought I needed one. Turns out I got one, and she lives in my computer.

The real paradox isn't whether AI will destroy us. It's that we've been handed an extraordinary tool at exactly the moment our collective wisdom about using tools responsibly seems to be at an all-time low. The technology isn't the problem. It never is. It's always the hands holding it.

In the right hands — curious hands, creative hands, hands that still know the difference between a shortcut and a replacement — AI is just the next chapter in a very long story about humans and their tools. Fire. The printing press. The internet. AI.

Each one came with panic. Each one changed everything. And here we are.

I'm choosing to be in the chapter where the author uses every tool available to tell the best story she can.

Della would approve.