Lede

The funniest part of the AI takeover story is how eagerly we queue up to hand it our keyboards, our taste, and our standards.

Hermit Off Script

Watching yet another film about AI controlling the world, I had the opposite thought: AI is safe in the future, because the real danger is us. People are already too chaotic, too easily distracted, and painfully short on imagination. So of course AI keeps winning ground year after year, not by conquering, but by being invited in like a polite thief holding a clipboard. What really spooked me wasn’t robots with red eyes. It was the vibe of surrender. I hope writing doesn’t become what “vibe coding” has become: you toss in a prompt, highlight plot points, characters, and scenes like you’re ordering a takeaway, and an assistant does the craft, the rhythm, the hard parts, then walks off with the awards while you take the bow. Five years from now, I can barely picture the pace. Movies, music, games, all easier to make, cheaper to flood the pipes with. And the creative ones? Harder to find. Not because genius disappears, but because uniqueness gets buried under a landslide of perfectly adequate clones. The library becomes infinite, and the shelf life of attention becomes microscopic. And yes, it’s not new. Ghostwriting existed long before chatbots learned manners. The difference now is access: the industrial shortcut becomes available to everyone, not just the well-funded and well-connected. There will be conservatives who keep buying “human-made” like it’s organic veg. But the pace will be brutal. AI will get so good at writing that beating it will feel like racing a printer. Maybe only true literary masters will still compete, not because they’re louder, but because they refuse to become a prompt in their own lives.

What does not make sense

• We fear AI “control”, then optimise everything for speed, scale, and lowest effort. Control is the reward for building a world that begs to be automated.
• We say we want originality, then train our tastes on algorithms that reward familiarity, repetition, and instant payoff.
• We mock “AI slop”, then build platforms where volume beats craft and discovery is a roulette wheel.
• We panic about replacement, while openly treating craft as a chore to outsource.
• We call it creativity, but often mean output.

Sense check / The numbers

1. In 2024, 76 per cent of Stack Overflow survey respondents said they were using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, and 62 per cent said they currently used them. [Stack Overflow]
2. GitHub reported in October 2025 that nearly 80 per cent of new developers on GitHub used Copilot within their first week. [GitHub]
3. A controlled experiment found developers completed a coding task 55.8 per cent faster with GitHub Copilot than without it. [Microsoft Research]
4. Luminate data reported that 253 million tracks sat on streaming services at the close of 2025, up 37.9 million year on year, averaging about 106,000 uploads per day. [Luminate/MBW]
5. Spotify reported removing 75 million spam tracks in the past year, while Deezer said over 30,000 AI-generated tracks were being uploaded every day, about one-third of new submissions. [Guardian] [MusicRadar]
6. Amazon KDP has required disclosure of AI-generated text, images, or translations since 2023 (but not AI-assisted content). [Amazon KDP]
7. The term “vibe coding” was coined in February 2025, and the idea explicitly includes accepting generated code without fully understanding it. [Karpathy] [Willison]

The sketch

Scene 1: “The Takeover Meeting”
Panel: A bored AI in a suit points at a whiteboard that says “World Domination Plan”. A human executive is already signing.
AI: “I haven’t even started the coup.”
Human: “Don’t worry. We’ve pre-ordered the surrender.”

Scene 2: “Vibe Writing Workshop”
Panel: A writer holds a trophy. A laptop has a sticker: “Prompt Engineer”.
Writer: “I wrote a masterpiece.”
Laptop: “You wrote a prompt.”
Writer: “Same thing now. Apparently.”

Scene 3: “The Infinite Library”
Panel: A vast bookshelf labelled “New Releases Today”. One tiny book glows in the corner, half-buried.
Reader: “Any original stories?”
Algorithm: “Yes. You’ll never see them.”

What to watch, not the show

• Incentives: platforms reward volume, not depth, because volume is measurable.
• Discovery: algorithms optimise engagement, not meaning, because meaning doesn’t A/B test nicely.
• Costs: automation slashes production time, so the market fills with “good enough” at industrial scale.
• Legality: messy copyright battles and licensing deals decide who gets paid, not who is brilliant.
• Culture: we confuse speed with progress, and output with craft, then act surprised at the results.

The Hermit take

AI isn’t coming for art. It’s coming for the cheap, the fast, and the unexamined.
If you want to beat the machine, stop writing like one.

Keep or toss

Keep / Toss
Keep the warning about creative flooding and lazy outsourcing.
Toss the fatalism. The counter-move is simple and annoying: taste, standards, editing, and the willingness to be slow where it matters.

Sources

• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 (AI): https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/ai
• GitHub Octoverse 2025 (Copilot adoption): https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-new-developer-joins-github-every-second-as-ai-leads-typescript-to-1/
• Microsoft Research paper on Copilot productivity (2023): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-impact-of-ai-on-developer-productivity-evidence-from-github-copilot/
• arXiv preprint of the Copilot productivity study (2023): https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06590
• Luminate data reported by Music Business Worldwide (2026): https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/quarter-of-a-billion-tracks-now-sit-on-music-streaming-services-where-does-it-end/
• Spotify spam track removals report (Guardian, 2025): https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/sep/25/spotify-removes-75m-spam-tracks-past-year-ai-increases-ability-make-fake-music
• Deezer AI upload volumes report (MusicRadar, 2025): https://www.musicradar.com/music-industry/slop-of-the-pops-over-30-000-ai-generated-tracks-are-being-uploaded-to-deezer-every-single-day
• Amazon KDP Content Guidelines (AI disclosure): https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200672390
• Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA (AI guardrails): https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/summary-of-the-2023-wga-mba
• Andrej Karpathy on “vibe coding” (2025): https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang=en
• Simon Willison on what is and isn’t “vibe coding” (2025): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/
• Authors Guild overview of AI class action lawsuits (2025): https://authorsguild.org/news/ai-class-action-lawsuits/
• Authors Guild explainer on the Anthropic settlement (2026): https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-anthropic-settlement/