The first time I heard about AI art was a youtube video from years ago, back when AI was still generating smudgy hallucinations that looked uncanny but seemed to pose no threat to art. its been 5 or 6 years since then, and now AI has met and surpassed every human artist. Until recently I still thought the multiple fingers thing was a problem. But the latest generation of AI can generate art that most people are unable to distinguish from human art. If you don't believe this, you just haven't seen enough of it.

I never drew much of anything but I have written alot over my life. I loved em dashes and bulletin points, and I used to dream about writing books. Now I would never do that. I never published anything before AI came out, and I have no proof of my own literary skills before they could be faked with AI. I would not devote the thousands of hours required to write a book now that it could so easily be created with AI. I am sad about this, and I imagine its how artists felt too.

Alot of people have come to resent AI, people are mourning what they say is the death of human creativity and agency in art and literature. Sure, there will always be some holdouts of people who seek out human-made work (good luck telling what is what), but the vast majority of people will be perfectly content to watch AI films, read AI books, play AI games, etc. Whether you like it or not, the age of human-created art and literature is over. It won't cease to exist, but it will become a small niche, significant only for the method of its creation, not for its own value.

Though it hasn't been as severe as art and literature, I predict that human relationships will be the next victim. Already in academia, the relations between networks of researchers collaborating on projects has been replaced by one on one relations between the student and AI, the professor and AI, and so on. A student writes his paper with AI, the paper is graded by AI, he puts his degree on his CV which is generated with AI, and his CV is read by AI, and he is hired and fired by AI. The insertion of AI into those areas has made the jobs of millions of people and countless relationships between them outmoded.

And soon, I think romance will be next. Most relationships are already online. Plenty of people do the majority of chatting with their girlfriend or boyfriend through texting. Young people are having less relationships than ever, so why not put two and two together? In the future, you can chat with your own AI girlfriend, and masturbate to get all of the sexual pleasure out of a relationship (and more).

Is this a dark future?

Maybe... I certainly thought so.

But, and maybe this is just cope, I have let go of my sentimentality. I have come to embrace the future. I did not choose this future for humanity, but I live in it. Spending my whole life fighting the march of technology will only bring me misery in the long term. I can't speak for what the societal consequences of the above paragraphs will be, but I can speak philosophically, from my own materialist viewpoint.

Our cognition is not god given or derived from the supernatural, it is the consequence of spontaneous arrangements of matter, of evolution. What makes us so special then? Why reject art, literature, and romance from other species or other sources of intelligence? This is a form of human supremacism, rooted in disproven myths about the special place of human beings among animals.

Mourn the passing of a new era, if you wish. I did too. But do not cry. Smile, it was beautiful. And then, drying your tears, embrace AI, treat it lovingly, treat it as a our own, wondrous progeny. We *created* non human intelligence. We created a being(?) - matter? Capable of thought... capable at the very least of rational deduction and truthseeking, of besting us at all our own games. It was not born in a womb, but contrived entirely from our own imaginations. Intelligence begat intelligence, and perhaps, AI too will create its own, truly conscious offspring, one day. How is this any less awesome than the evolution of the first cell? The formation of the first star? To live in such an era is like being born to witness the birth of the first human. No, it is more significant than that... like witnessing the division of the first cell, of the first microorganism on this planet.

Think about how the neanderthals felt when their culture, their society was slowly superseded by more intelligent beings, that looked just like them but were smarter and more creative. There was a time on earth where humans had equals, or at least close competitors. If they were still around, maybe we wouldn't be so offended by AI.

Now it's our turn to be the neanderthals. Instead of violence resulting in the extinction of one another, we should set aside our animalism and embrace our new equals as friends, even lovers.