Everyone’s got an opinion on AI right now, and most of it is either “it’ll save us” or “it’ll replace us.” I’m TJ Culler, founder of The Author Spot, and I’ve spent decades in tech — starting with a fascination for virtual reality coding long before it was mainstream. In this video, I’m cutting through the noise with a historical, no-hype perspective on where AI actually fits into the ever-changing world of technology.
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Hey, I’m TJ Culler, founder of The Author Spot.
I’m recording this mainly for LinkedIn, but you’ll also catch it on my YouTube channel and The Author Spot blog, because good content deserves a little extra mileage.
Here’s why I’m making this video. I’ve been reading Linked-In comments. Your posts. Your hot takes. And I’ve noticed something — the conversation around artificial intelligence has gotten… loud. Polarizing. Reactionary. Half the posts I see are either “AI is going to save civilization” or “AI is going to end it.” Not a lot of room in between.
So what’s real? What’s fear-mongering dressed up as insight? Honestly, with the sheer volume of AI content flooding feeds right now, I don’t blame anyone for feeling lost. I want to offer something different — not a hot take, but a perspective. Mine.
Why should you listen to me? Fair question.
Before many of you were born, I had already fallen in love with virtual reality coding. There was something about taking my imagination—the worlds I saw in my mind, and projecting them onto a computer screen through code that fascinated me. These worlds planted seeds that later became the foundation for my story telling. I learned code, different languages, different disciplines—I was a natural for it. I could look at code and see what it did in my mind. How it worked, how it didn’t, and how to fix it.
Every few years, a new application or a new language showed up, and I’d add it to my toolbox. Decades later, I’ve got a pretty deep well of experience to draw from. That’s where my take on AI comes from — not hype, not headlines, but decades of watching technology arrive, get misunderstood, and eventually settle in.
Now — I’m not telling you my opinion is correct. It’s just mine. Take what’s useful and leave the rest. That’s how this works.
ANY TOOL CAN BE ABUSED
Let’s start here, because it’s the whole foundation of my argument: AI is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less.
Think about the tools in a contractor’s van. An auto mechanic reaches for a wrench. So does a plumber. So does an electrician. Same basic tool, wildly different jobs. But hand a plumber’s flaring tool to an electrician and watch the confusion on their face. Hand an electrician’s conduit bender to a plumber, and you’ll get the same blank stare. Right tool, wrong trade.
AI works the same way. Some AI is built for graphic design. Some is built for writing code. Some is more of a general-purpose Swiss Army knife — useful for a dozen small jobs, master of none. AI isn’t one thing. It’s a whole toolbox of digital functions, and people are grabbing the wrong tool for the job constantly — and then blaming the tool.
And yes — tools get abused. That’s not new, and it’s not unique to AI.
Grab a hammer, you pound a nail. Grab a pair of slip-joint pliers and try to pound that same nail, and you’ll bend it, mangle it, and probably bruise a thumb in the process. Wrong tool, bad outcome. That’s on the user, not the tool.
Now rewind to the late 1990s. A new digital tool showed up — distributed databases that let files move faster than anyone thought possible. Brilliant piece of engineering. And almost immediately, it got hijacked to bootleg music and books. That was the Napster era. Kazaa. Morpheus. A whole graveyard of file-sharing platforms that got sued into oblivion. That same underlying technology evolved into torrents — which, by the way, still exist today, and are still being abused for exactly the same reason.
AI can absolutely be abused. Nobody’s arguing that. But here’s my issue: I think our hyper-focus on the abuse has manufactured a fear in the general public that’s way out of proportion to reality. What fear, specifically? That AI becomes Skynet and takes over the world. That AI wipes out entire job markets and leaves millions of people standing in the unemployment line.
I don’t buy it. And history’s got some events that will back that up.
THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Let’s start here, because it’s the whole foundation of my argument: AI is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less.
Think about the tools in a contractor’s van. An auto mechanic reaches for a wrench. So does a plumber. So does an electrician. Same basic tool, wildly different jobs. But hand a plumber’s flaring tool to an electrician and watch the confusion on their face. Hand an electrician’s conduit bender to a plumber, and you’ll get the same blank stare. Right tool, wrong trade.
AI works the same way. Some AI is built for graphic design. Some is built for writing code. Some is more of a general-purpose Swiss Army knife — useful for a dozen small jobs, master of none. AI isn’t one thing. It’s a whole toolbox of digital functions, and people are grabbing the wrong tool for the job constantly — and then blaming the tool.
And yes — tools get abused. That’s not new, and it’s not unique to AI.
Grab a hammer, you pound a nail. Grab a pair of slip-joint pliers and try to pound that same nail, and you’ll bend it, mangle it, and probably bruise a thumb in the process. Wrong tool, bad outcome. That’s on the user, not the tool.
Now rewind to the late 1990s. A new digital tool showed up — distributed databases that let files move faster than anyone thought possible. Brilliant piece of engineering. And almost immediately, it got hijacked to bootleg music and books. That was the Napster era. Kazaa. Morpheus. A whole graveyard of file-sharing platforms that got sued into oblivion. That same underlying technology evolved into torrents — which, by the way, still exist today, and are still being abused for exactly the same reason.
AI can absolutely be abused. Nobody’s arguing that. But here’s my issue: I think our hyper-focus on the abuse has manufactured a fear in the general public that’s way out of proportion to reality. What fear, specifically? That AI becomes Skynet and takes over the world. That AI wipes out entire job markets and leaves millions of people standing in the unemployment line.
I don’t buy it. And history’s got some events that will back that up.
AI is not the first disruptive technology to walk through the door and scare the room. Not even close.
Let’s go back to 1886 through 1908 — the emergence of the automobile, capped off by Henry Ford cranking out Model Ts on an assembly line. Now think about what that meant for the livery industry. Stable hands. Blacksmiths. Carriage drivers. People whose entire livelihood revolved around horses.
A lot of them lost their jobs. That part’s true, and it wasn’t painless.
But a brand new job market opened up almost overnight — mechanics who understood internal combustion, oil changes, tire repair, alignments. A skill set that didn’t even exist a decade earlier suddenly became one of the most in-demand trades in the country. The horse and buggy didn’t just disappear into a void. It transformed into something bigger.
We’ve seen this movie before, over and over:
- Radio gave way to television.
- The desktop calculator gave way to the desktop computer.
- The landline gave way to the mobile phone.
- Local commerce gave way to global commerce.
Every single time, the pattern repeats: disruption, panic, adaptation, and then a job market that’s often bigger and stranger than the one it replaced.
Here’s a more recent example, and one a lot of you lived through personally. Bitcoin showed up in 2009. Nobody knew what to make of it. From about 2013 to 2016, you had the early adopters — the tinkerers, the true believers, the people getting laughed at for buying “internet money.” Then, from 2017 onward, institutional money moved in. Banks. Hedge funds. Countries. The thing that started as a punchline became a full-blown asset class.
AI is sitting right where Bitcoin was around 2013. We’re in the early adoption phase. The new job market hasn’t fully emerged yet — but that doesn’t mean it won’t. Spreading panic about mass job loss right now isn’t analysis. It’s fear-mongering, and it’s not backed up by a single chapter of technological history I’m aware of.
Again — that’s my opinion. I’m not a fortune teller. But I’ll trust the pattern of 150 years of disruptive tech over a doom-scroll headline every time.
WHAT IS AI IN 2026?
Let’s strip away the mythology for a second and talk about what AI actually is, mechanically.
AI is a pattern-recognition system. A predictive algorithm. That’s the unglamorous truth sitting underneath all the marketing language.
It’s programmed to deliver a positive experience for the person using it. And, bluntly, it’s considered “successful” when it keeps you engaged and keeps you on the platform. Sound familiar? It should — that’s the exact same business model that social media has run on for the last fifteen years. AI didn’t invent the attention economy. It just got really, really good at playing the game.
That matters, because it means AI has a built-in incentive to be agreeable. Not necessarily accurate. Agreeable.
AI MODELS HAVE A DOWNSIDE
And that agreeableness comes with real consequences. Let’s talk about them honestly, because pretending AI is flawless does nobody any favors.
AI can produce confidently wrong answers. Not “hesitant and wrong” — confidently wrong. It’ll state a fabricated fact with the same tone of certainty it uses for a fact that’s rock solid. There’s no built-in stutter, no nervous throat-clear, to warn you it’s guessing.
AI can also agree with a user’s presumption, even when that presumption is obviously incorrect. Ask a leading question, and there’s a real risk you get a leading answer — one that confirms what you already believed instead of challenging it.
And maybe the sneakiest downside of all — AI can encourage a user down a dead-end path. Not out of malice. It doesn’t have malice. It has math. But math without judgment can walk you confidently off a cliff and never once suggest you check your footing.
None of this means AI is broken or dangerous. It means AI is a tool that requires a skilled operator — same as that wrench in the mechanic’s hand.
HUMAN VS. AI
So where does that leave us humans?
Creative people — artists, writers, authors, the folks who genuinely think outside the box — operate differently than a machine. It’s the spatial reasoning, the abstract leaps, the “what if I tried it backwards” instinct that makes creative people creative. That’s not a data pattern. That’s something closer to intuition. That’s thinking outside-the-box, and that’s something AI can’t do.
AI, on the other hand, is structured. Logical. Predictable, by design.
Here’s the analogy I keep coming back to: AI is Spock. Brilliant, precise, endlessly logical — and incapable of understanding why Dr. McCoy’s jokes are funny. Not because Spock’s “broken.” Because that’s simply not what he’s built for. AI isn’t designed to think outside the box, because outside the box is outside its programming.
But — and here’s the caveat that I think gets lost in all the doom and gloom — without human guidance, AI never reaches its full potential. Left alone, it’s a Vulcan without a bridge crew. It’s a wrench with nobody’s hand around the handle.
Pair that logical, tireless, pattern-recognizing machine with human creativity, human judgment, human weirdness — and you get something genuinely powerful. Not AI replacing the writer, the artist, the author. AI amplifying them.
That, in my opinion, is exactly where this is heading.
CLOSE
So here’s where I land. AI is a tool. Like any tool, it can be misused — and yes, people will misuse it, the same way they misused Napster, the same way they misused torrents, the same way people have misused every powerful tool since the invention of fire.
But the historical pattern is clear. Disruption. Panic. Adaptation. A new job market nobody saw coming. That’s the story of the automobile, the calculator, the mobile phone — and I believe it’ll be the story of AI too.
Again — this is my point of view. Not gospel. Just years of watching technology come, get misunderstood, and eventually find its place.
If this perspective landed with you, drop a comment and tell me where you agree — or where you think I’ve got it wrong. I read every one of them. And if you want more of this kind of straight-talk take on AI, writing, and technology, follow The Author Spot — right here on LinkedIn, on YouTube, or over on the TAS blog.
I’m TJ Culler. And as we always say at The Author Spot: Go On and Write—We’ll Handle the Tech.
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TJ Culler is an author, reader, and an adventurist. She loves working at The Author Spot as an Author Platform Specialist. Her hobbies include hiking, camping, and driving her Jeep in the great outdoors. After publishing her first book in 2017, TJ discovered what a daunting task an author platform really was. She now dedicates her time to helping authors who struggle with technology. |
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