Seeing the release of the current wave of AI models, it makes me deeply reflect on what could’ve been for a nobody nerd like me witnessing a decade of progress.

I still remember when, in 2018, in the high school library, I stumbled on make.girls.moe for generating waifus with GANs. My mind was, blown, “Whoa, you can make waifus straight out of your computer!” The same year GPT-1 was released, but only in nerdy news, not available on a public API.

(For context on how nerdy I am: further back, when I was in middle school, my airhead was full of Sword Art Online & No Game No Life. In 2015, before the word “vtuber” was coined, I tried clunky Live2D, trying to talk with an anime girl that followed my cursor. Like, whoa, I can be anime?!?!)

My mind often wonders about seeing the possibilities even back before the 2020s. The tech itself already could bring imaginary output out of nowhere. I always anticipated that the way our perception works would be disrupted. I can’t describe how, but I’m kind of preparing myself for that uncertainty.

I always saw AI & robots as cool things, until I arrived at the current point. It’s like what I imagined a decade ago came true in front of my screen. But is it beautiful like I thought it would be? No. It’s ugly, brutally honest. The ugly side is in the humanside, not the tech itself. Advancement and progress are beautiful.

If I speak about the possibilities that current tech has brought to the table, I’m not joking, I’d say it’s already feel the abundance.

Unlike my bloody flesh brain, my PC’s transistors are literally immortal thinking rocks. An 12 GB VRAM consumer hardware setup could work 24/7 generating text, visuals, and audio all in a loop, reinforced learning even though it’s dumb, but it’s decent at mimicking human patterns.

When I see posts like “we are cooked,” “it’s so over,” “this is game changing,” it’s only noise, but when I test worthy new tech things, it becomes science fiction epic music to my ears.

It’s not about whether it can generate good anime, video, code, or any media. Out of that space, it’s about our collective consciousness as human, the psychological realm which mirrors our biological world. The paradigm has shifted, reality has shifted, and it cannot be undone.

Security is more important than ever. Funny how a simple ability—like not being in touch with your computer and phone, it can become self-sovereignty as thinking creatures.

If you are creators, no matter which field—feeling (artist) or logic (math/code), then actualizing your imagination without delegating to machine becomes your real muscle, the most valuable skill, your understanding that only belongs to you. It means when you’re making something with machines, the output is guaranteed to be 1000× better than people who barely try or practice.

I’m not sold on the narrative of AI output coming from trained stolen data anymore, because what can I do when the squished entirety of human history fits into silicon parameters and is already distributed, and can run on your local computer power, usable here in the rural mountains? The model and the math telling the truth.

And in this early singularity, I pray kindness, beauty, & health will win in what’s coming, because it’s the only way that strengthens our existence, the only things matter.

I remember how it felt before everything was obvious.