Over the last few weeks I have been having various chats, both formal and informal, about how social media and the internet is going in 2026 and it has become very clear that the majority of people feel AI is currently ruining everything. Yes, everything! Just let that sink in. People feel that AI is that bad it is ruining their lives…. now that is a headline that makes sobering reading isn’t it? So I used AI to make an image for this post, as you do!
Now let me be clear, I use AI sparingly and at no outlay for me to create things that I am not that great at creating, like for example the above image. This was generated with chatgpt, took approx. 40 seconds to generate and is several times better than what I could create. I could have searched the tinternet and grabbed someone else’s image, but I chose to use AI because it highlights the real issues here. Is my (small) usage of AI an issue, well yes, probably. Am I putting somebody out of work or ruining things – that is way harder to quantify because for the small amount I use AI I could easily have just searched for an image and grabbed it, because well there are billions of images out there that would probably do. But the image I chose depicts pretty much the way most people feel right now, and searching for a suitable image could have taken me minutes…. and that is THE thing! People, in general, are lazy, we all know it, and currently you can generate things faster and for less money (to you) than if you pay for someone else to do it, or buy something or right now search for it (google you are getting useless). However this is not sustainable at all, and there will be a time quite shortly, when AI becomes paid for just like “free” accounts are starting to disappear as people are no longer willing to have their data sold everywhere and/or ads that ruin the service!
So this is where we are nowadays – some users despise AI, others love it and use it. I think the real issue here is that a lot of the users who say it is ruining everything just see it being mentioned everywhere. I can relate to that, I have server setups and AI is literally in every project and update these days, but still it can be useful in some limited situations. I have outlined just one above but I am sure many more exist. One I *think* will be useful is AI doing summaries and minutes of online meetings, though I haven’t tried it yet. I don’t know anyone who enjoys doing the minutes so I should explore it further. I do have to finally add that a lot of people who despise AI only see it on social media, and that is down to how social media is changing. A lot of people seem to think that social media is only really facebook and we all know that is on a downwards trajectory and is flooded by AI slop – but that is down to meta wanting it that way and also giving everyone the tools to create the slop in the first place! So let us see what happens moving forward – I can’t see it getting better however before it gets a lot worse…