Finding joy in the age of artificial intelligence

Happiness knew no bound / Be at home or on playground / Finally, life falling in place / Zooming ahead with grace.

Biscuits with cream, biscuits without cream / Jar bright and tempting filled to brim / Third from left, reassured self / Best for now, rest for later / Manish uncle’s unplanned visit / Brought happiness with it.

Bananas ripe made my day / Nothing else needed I can say / Kaala Patthar starts at nine / Can’t wait, the time is mine.

New pen stored careful / Inside my bag half not full / Scribble-tested smooth and fast / At last, at last.

Four balls to bat / Not a great start / Chetan played strong and long / While I waited for him / to do wrong.

White shoes for school tomorrow / Sports class lots of fun / Hop jump sprint and run / Things for kids so simple / Bring happiness multiple.

Happiness knew no bound / Be at home or on playground / Finally, life falling in place / Zooming ahead with grace.

A significant part of our life has already been inundated with AI. For those working in AI, in some sense, are paid to inundate. With the entire content of the Internet already considered as part of the large language model’s training dataset, we have little left for future LLMs to learn from. I mean, little human-generated, original content is left.

The moment we get out of bed and pick up our mobile phones, we are greeted with notifications of news articles, movie reviews, and stories related to LLMs from around the world. They are curated by recommendation engines that we have been developing over time. We go to the regular supermarket. A machine-learning model likely determines the placement of items on the shelves. If you didn’t know, you are the four rows in a data scientist’s training dataset. You come back home, switch on the TV, and see Sam Altman declaring Gen AI is dead. It is going to be the era of Artificial superintelligence. I get overwhelmed and complain, “Brother, let’s get the hang of Gen AI before you jump to ASI or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), whichever way you want to name it. I was reviewing the concepts of vibe coding and hydrating the prompts when Andrew Ng’s LinkedIn post highlighted lazy prompting.

My spouse and I are divided by our beliefs, outlook on life, and, more importantly, by how we plan to spend today the money we will earn next month. However, we are united by Gen AI, which we work on. AI is playing Cupid.

One day in the future, every facet of our life will be consumed with artificial intelligence (“artificial” underlined). The online content that future LLMs need for their learning will be AI-generated. We will eventually have the AI version of AI-generated content once future large language models (LLMs) start producing content unbridled. The recursion of artificialness continues. That is the time we will again crave human-generated original content like fresh air. Similarly, these days, we often ask for home-cooked food or a village-like natural environment to spend a few days free from pollution and noise.

In a world increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence, our hunger for genuine human connection and authentic experiences intensifies. Like children finding joy in white shoes and ripe bananas, perhaps our salvation lies in rediscovering life’s simple pleasures— untrained, unfiltered, and gloriously imperfect. As algorithms predict our every desire, the spontaneous scribble of a new pen or the unplanned visit bringing happiness might be our most revolutionary acts. This is a reminder that in a recursive loop of artificiality, human authenticity remains our most precious resource.