AI is everywhere this year. My memes are either AI generated or about AI. You know, the absurd slop cat videos that look wrong in a way I can’t explain. In my email, finishing my sentences. It shows up in people’s photos as something that looks exactly like them and yet unmistakably isn’t them, very uncanny valley. But AI can only generate likeness. It cannot generate a vibe.
That distinction is the centre of the current panic around artificial intelligence. Since late 2022, when generative AI went mainstream, the anxiety has felt different from past technological shifts. This time, the fear isn’t just about automation of labour or efficiency gains, it’s about meaning. AI doesn’t just do tasks. It writes, draws, speaks, imitates. It enters spaces we once assumed were human-only.
Historically, this fear isn’t new. Every major technological leap, from mechanised looms to computers, has displaced workers, while eventually creating new industries. Those transitions were never painless, but they followed a pattern. What feels different now is scope. AI performs cognitive tasks across fields simultaneously, leading some experts to argue that this time may actually be different.
And yet, I’m oddly calm about it. Maybe AI can take my job. But it can’t take my absurdity. AI cannot quote a random meme or Bollywood movie in the middle of a conversation, derailing the whole point of that interaction. AI cannot order my friend a cheesecake just because it can sense that she’s sad. AI might be able to write perfectly, but it cannot recreate my unique writing style. Can AI randomly say, “All my flabbers are gasted!” after hearing something shocking? It most certainly won’t but I can and I do.
The line “AI can take my job, not my vibe” might sound flippant, but it captures something serious. AI is a system trained on data. Humans are systems shaped by experience and in my case, a lot of brain rot. We carry contradictions. We change our minds halfway through sentences. We make decisions influenced by mood, memory, and fatigue. That messiness isn’t inefficiency, it’s context; it’s essence.
This is visible in AI-generated art. The images are stunning, symmetrical, and technically impressive yet hollow. You can always (well, mostly) tell. There’s no accident in them. No error that becomes meaningful later. No moment where someone chose the wrong colour and discovered something better. And even if you believe it for a moment, when you realise that it’s AI, the wonder of the spectacle disappears. AI cannot create that flaw in the picture that I can, the half-open mouth, the wrong angle, the eyes half shut.
Human creativity depends on friction. The badly written fanfiction I read on Wattpad as a teenager did more to shape my inner life than any perfectly optimised AI story. Van Gogh’s work didn’t change my brain chemistry because it was clean, it did so because it was unstable, emotional. It drew something out of me. A man consumed by grief painted stars in an asylum. That is what makes it beautiful, context. I started painting because of it, not to accomplish greatness but just because I thought grief can be tackled like that.
AI can replicate style. It cannot replicate context. A Ghibli style picture cannot replace the wonder the movies have in them. People don’t love Ghibli because the art is “cute”, but because of the fantasy, whimsy, emotion and meaning embedded in the art.
Built for optimisation
This also becomes clearer when AI is asked to reason morally. I once asked an AI chatbot whether killing someone is wrong, and it said yes, with caveats. Self-defence. Legal framing. Ethical qualifiers. It answers correctly, but not meaningfully. It doesn’t hesitate. It doesn’t feel the weight of what it’s saying, of what a life means, what it costs.
Ask it for advice about people, and it often validates you, even when you’re wrong. Its instinct is resolution: Quit the job, cut off the friend, optimise the outcome. Efficiency over reckoning. Closure over accountability. That’s not a flaw. That’s what it was built to do.
Which is why the panic about replacement often misunderstands the role AI was meant to play. AI was supposed to assist, not replace. A quote from the author Joanna Maciejewska captures what I feel about AI—“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” That feels like the correct hierarchy.
In the workplace, AI excels at automating repetitive, data-heavy tasks. That doesn’t eliminate human labour so much as shift it. Roles change. Judgement, interpretation, empathy, and decision-making become more valuable, not less. The future isn’t human versus machine. It’s human with machine.
Experts broadly agree on this point: Those who learn to work with AI will thrive. Not by competing with it on efficiency, but by doing what it cannot. Reading a room. Navigating ambiguity. Making choices without clean data. Knowing when not to optimise. AI cannot play characters. Like me, it cannot be unpredictable. It can’t text a friend telling them I love them just because I felt like it.
AI knows more words than I do. But it does not know when silence matters.
Humans will remain
That’s the part of the conversation we’re missing. The fear of replacement assumes humans are primarily producers of output. But humans have never been good at being machines. We are inconsistent. Our best work often emerges from boredom, grief, obsession, or joy. We are not just sums of what we produce. We are shaped by what stays with us. So yes, AI will continue to advance. It will reshape industries. Some jobs will disappear. New ones will appear. The transition will be uncomfortable, as it always has been.
But the qualities that make humans irreplaceable were never efficiency or scale. They are intuition, contradiction, emotional intelligence, and vibe. AI can generate an exact likeness of you. It cannot be you. And in a world increasingly obsessed with optimisation, that stubborn refusal to be predictable may be the last human advantage worth protecting.
And out of habit, ending this with a beautiful quote from Dead Poets Society to put things into perspective, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” I bet AI wouldn’t add a John Keating quote.
Source – https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/ai-can-replace-my-job-but-not-my-vibe/2815350/