Do you remember the feeling of dread that hung in the air two years ago when GenAI was making daily headlines? I certainly do. Two years ago, I wrote a New Year’s column – my so-called “resolutions” – where I laid out my fears about ChatGPT and the creeping sense that AI would soon eat up entire industries, including my own role as a writer.
It felt as though the AI-fuelled tech world, fresh off the hype around ChatGPT’s ability to churn out content in the blink of an eye, might drag us into a future where human creativity had diminishing value. Or so I fretted at least, while gloomily tapping away at my keyboard.
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Fast forward to January 2025, and guess what? The sky didn’t fall, I’m still here, tapping away, and – drum rolls please – the world hasn’t turned into a dystopian playground ruled by AI just yet. With a growing sense of relief, I can’t help but look back at how these past two years have shaped our relationship with AI and, in the process, unearth just how far we’ve come from all the doom and gloom scenarios.
The AI hype was real
When GenAI apps first burst onto the scene towards the end of 2022 and early 2023, everyone was talking about how ChatGPT (and every other tool with a wacky name) would do everything from writing essays and debugging code to diagnosing rare diseases and replacing school and college professors. The fear factor was tangibly real – for example, artists dreaded AI image generators, musicians worried about AI-composed pop hits, and us “wordsmiths” envisioned our keyboards collecting dust in a museum.
Cut to the present, and the conversation has shifted in unexpected ways. Yes, we did see a flood of AI-generated text, code, images, videos, bots and such in 2023 through 2024. But as the hype settled, people realised that pure machine output often lacks the intangible “human touch” that can’t be automated so easily. AI’s knack for generating quick answers or boilerplate text is certainly beneficial, but it doesn’t quite replicate creative leaps of human ingenuity. And that’s where the synergy story starts.
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One of the most telling shifts I’ve observed over the past year or so is how GenAI has become an essential tool in many work scenarios – rather than a rival conjured by our early knee jerk fears. For instance, two years ago the marketing department in every digital company might’ve panicked that AI would replace copywriters. But today, they’re more likely using AI to speed up the brainstorming process and refine initial drafts, freeing creative folk to focus on intangible storytelling and building brand voice. Similarly, data scientists are relying on AI tools to handle grunt work like data cleaning or generating baseline algorithms, freeing up their time to concentrate on the bigger picture. All of this is happening in architecture to automobile manufacturing, music creation to game design, and virtually every other industry and field of work that you can imagine.
As far as my own writing is concerned, ChatGPT hasn’t quite replaced me in my job. On the contrary, I rely on it as a tool for quick research, summarising lengthy PDFs or brainstorming synonyms when my mental thesaurus malfunctions, while I thrash out the larger angle of an article, its tone and overall flow. My view of AI is like an enthusiastic intern eager to please – super quick, a bit naive, but often incredibly helpful when you know how to direct its energies.
Embracing AI is inevitable
Back in 2023, after ChatGPT, Midjourney and DALL-E made some serious waves, it seemed like every second or third tweet on my feed was about AI art tools “stealing jobs” from illustrators. Yes, AI-generated images exploded onto the scene, leading some artists to lament the imminent death of their profession. But if you’ll notice now that AI has turned into a sophisticated brush or a camera setting – in other words, just another medium. Artists blend AI-generated patterns with their own style. Musicians use AI to get chord progressions but then add their personal flair. The result? Hybrids that combine the best of both worlds. Against my worst fears, I feel the spark of originality is alive and well – just augmented by a powerful new tool.
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Beyond end users and consumer-facing AI dominated headlines, a lot has also happened in the enterprise realm of AI. Big corporations initially hesitated to feed proprietary data into cloud-based AI tools. But over the past two years, there’s been a steady rise of on-premises AI solutions that keep data within the company’s own data centers. That helps maintain data sovereignty and (regulatory) compliance. The endgame is that businesses can train and deploy AI models securely, ensuring everything from healthcare data to financial records remains locked down. It’s an environment that fosters progress without jeopardising trust.
At the beginning of 2025, it’s quite clear to me that the future of AI is less about replacing us and more about augmenting our abilities to be more productive. Yes, AI has automated some mundane roles, but that’s something we’ve seen with every tech revolution, isn’t it? Think how cars replaced carts, calculators replaced abacus, and spreadsheets replaced tedious pen-and-paper bookkeeping. AI entered our lives and did change the game, yes, but we adapted. We found ways to integrate AI that expand capabilities rather than crush entire industries. Sure, challenges related to AI ethics loom large, but hopefully we will overcome them in time.
Ultimately, I can’t help but think that in an increasingly digitally connected world, humans still need humans – both to create the emotional connect in any creative endeavour and for making nuanced decisions that can’t be purely data-driven. It’s something AI will probably never be able to fully replace.
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Jayesh Shinde
Executive Editor at Digit. Technology journalist since Jan 2008, with stints at Indiatimes.com and PCWorld.in. Enthusiastic dad, reluctant traveler, weekend gamer, LOTR nerd, pseudo bon vivant. View Full Profile
