The Two Most Controversial Truths of Our Time

1. AI is one of the greatest human achievements ever created.

2. AI is also destroying lives of millions faster than they could emotionally or economically sustain.

Both can be true. And pretending otherwise is the real danger.

This Is Not an Anti-AI Post. We have not come here to rant…

AI is extraordinary.

In fact, what AI has achieved in the last two to three years is nothing short of marvellous.

Knowledge that once took years of time and money to acquire is now available in seconds. It is not about where you are the money you have, the language you speak, and access you have to places, it all collapsed overnight.

Say in 2020, if someone in Coimbatore wanted to learn Arabic in 3 months to find a job in gulf and had ₹10,000, the idea itself would sound stupid. Where would they find a teacher? How would they practice? How long would it take before they could speak without fear? Three months would have been only a fantasy. Years would be the realistic answer.

Today, that same person can open a screen, speak to the screen without shame, be corrected immediately, understand cultural slangs and practice every single day. And in just three months, speak like he was born there. This is not magic. It’s engineering and data that has made machine learning adaptive.

We can’t keep saying it took away jobs, AI has not only helped corporations. It has helped millions of Students, small businesses, digital creators and the people who were always on the outside of the place only elites had access to.

Recently, we did a multi-model photoshoot. A real one, just grand. The kind that takes time, patience, and money long before a single frame is captured. Months of planning. Budgets. Contracts. Legal paperwork. Mood boards. Art direction. Locations. Equipment. Calls that ran late into the night. Brainstorms that went nowhere before they went somewhere. Teams assembling, disassembling, aligning again.

Behind the camera where years of training and millions invested slowly, carefully, painfully. In front of the camera were models who had built their presence over time. Makeup artists. Editors. Crew. Assistants. Location owners. Logistics. Travel. Risk.

This wasn’t just a photo. It was like a movie being made, any creator can see the work behind it.

While we had non breach contracts that restricted us from sharing them anywhere as all the outfits we tried were backed by years of R&D, a person from the assist crew casually photographed the model and generated a super realistic photo in seconds, even though the resolution is not printable or zoomable, it was pretty shocking for the entire crew. There was no smudged lens, no lighting issue, no missed moment. Just a clean, polished result that looked like the output of months of work.This moment made everyone on the set a little uncomfortable for a brief moment, so many self doubts and so many unanswered questions within us.

Multiple models. Operations manager. Floor managers. Production managers. Fashion Designers. Three editors. Camera crew. Makeup artist. Art Director. Multiple locations. Sleepless nights, A directory of pros, All gone in seconds. Not replaced by fewer people, replaced by literally none. An entire chain of human effort collapsed in seconds.

This is not the first time…

People respond to this with history lessons. They talk about bullock carts and cars, film and digital, artisans and machines. But this something different,

When trucks and cars arrived, they were rare, expensive, and inaccessible. Bullock carts didn’t vanish. They coexisted for decades, India’s first truck was introduced by Tata in 1954, for a commoner it was far from affordable, the industries adapted though, but it took another 49 years to be affordable until Bolero’s pick-up or Ace made it cheaper in 2005. But even after that I personally have seen Bullocks on roads until 2015.

First digital camera came to India was Ricoh RDC in 1995and the first movie made with it was in 2005 (Mumbai Express), then in 2006 (Moonnamathoral), There was no rush to catch up even with fancy tech, even the industry with million dollars in the pocket didn’t still jump, it was affordable but required not just money but also operators, even after the first film, the so called old school still had time to jump into digital slowly without scraping their entire life away in minutes.

The Industrial Revolution replaced 5 men with tools to 2 men in computers. It was brutal, the change took almost 2 decades to establish in common places, the education curriculum made space for that too, roles shifted , skills improved, we adapted slowly to survive the change.

AI has done something fundamentally different.

It simply wipes out and replaces none, it doesn’t take decades anymore, anything launched today is trending tomorrow, obsolete in a year, it makes years of investment useless all in seconds.

Say a data analyst spent 80L over 7-8 years with equipment, education & practice, what will his expectations be? Simple! Get that expenditure back in 4-5 years and make a decent living in the process, and settle in, but with the rate the things are picking up he’ll end up in debt and depression. This is not just financial loss, but economical collapse and unpredictability.

Knowledge is everywhere now. Tools are free. Execution is cheap. What’s rare is judgment. Accountability. Context. Responsibility. Trust. AI can generate images, text, music, but it can not replace judgement, build relationships, carry out re-corrections, act on the feet, just so many more things, it might do, atleast not yet! All that burden still belongs to us.

AI is also not entirely bad, it is just how we use it, just like having phones with directories replaced or need to remember phone numbers. It has just made lives easier, we can do more with less, it is better to not grow dependable and grow skills while it is still cheap and accessible. We have unlocked a whole new world of opportunities with AI that was nearly impossible before. All the images on this blog as great as it looks are totally generated, indeed it has replaced a graphic designer, but it is here in seconds. Any new tool will replace the previous one, it is just happening too fast now, and it is okay!And here’s the uncomfortable truth: this is the new reality. It will not slow down. The market will not wait for fairness. The extraction has already happened. Survival of the fittest no longer means being the best artist in the room. It means being adaptable, collaborative, and positioned beyond mere output.

This is no longer a time to compete with the person next door.

It’s a time to join the person next door, exchange knowledge, mix strengths, and build something larger than any individual could manage alone. Because isolated creators will burn out. Communities will grow.

History has always shown this. When two people come together, intelligence compounds. When communities share, they lift each other up. When people isolate, they break. As machines become more capable alone, humans must become more human together.

If there is a future worth building, it will not be built in isolation.

It is time we grow together, jump into communities, rely on each other, grow together!