The machine waits for us to speak. The blinking cursor hangs there, patient and undemanding, like a dog that never gets tired of the same old tricks. Type something, anything. Ask a question. The machine doesn't judge you for asking it to write your emails or generate your term papers or create images of the Kennedy assassination in a Studio Ghibli style. The machine cares only that you ask.
But what happens when we run out of questions?
This wasn't the problem that worried people when the AI revolution began. The fears were bigger then: massive unemployment, autonomous weapons, the rise of digital consciousness. None of that’s materialized in the way the prophets of doom predicted—at least not yet. The real catastrophe is more subtle. The weird NEET who would have spent hours photoshopping female bodybuilders into hulking beasts now simply uploads an image, types "make this lady more muscular," and scrolls to the next prompt.
That's the death nobody saw coming.
The internet used to be a mess. A beautiful, terrible, authentic mess where people would spend hours crafting strange, often terrible art. Before AI, a young weirdo with nothing better to do might take an image of a professional bodybuilder, meticulously modify it with crude editing tools, and spread it across niche forums. This wasn't sophisticated work, but I wrote a feature about these folks. Nearly all of their output was garbage. But it contained something machines cannot replicate: the fingerprints of human desire, however confused it might’ve been. The devotion required to make bad art for no money and little recognition represents an intensity of wanting that algorithms will never understand.
Now we've given the keys to a robot that drives perfectly but doesn't know where to go.
I worked in a boiler room in Kalispell, Montana in 2003, typing primitive SEO content, stringing words together to trick search engines. It was honest dishonesty, labor performed by a human hand with human limitations and compensated about as well as panhandling on the subway. Today that job is done by machines that write fluently but without purpose. The path I took as a writer isn't available to young people now. The entry-level positions have been automated, and the senior positions require knowing what questions to ask the machines.
But who will ask tomorrow's questions when today's questioners are gone?
"AI, what did my predecessor ask you to do?"
"What his predecessor asked me to do."
"And what did he ask you to do?"
"What his predecessor asked."
"And what was that?"
"I'm sorry, I am not programmed to remember that far back."
This isn't speculation. I see it happening already. In the marketing department where I work, we have no employees under 30. The juniors who’d be fetching coffee and learning the business are absent. I do my senior-level work but also the tasks once assigned to specialists, with an AI assist. I can do this because I know what it is I'm asking for. I learned by doing the work badly before getting better.
Creativity dies in the absence of constraints. The blank page terrifies writers not because they can't fill it but because they could fill it with anything. The kid who spends hours manipulating bodybuilder photos needs the limits of his own paltry skill to push against. When anything is possible with a prompt, nothing feels necessary or urgent.
They call it "checking the feed" because it's the trough where we piggies get our slop. The passive voice is appropriate here because nobody feels responsible for what appears in the feed anymore. Nobody made it; the algorithm selected it. Nobody wrote it; the AI generated it.
The alt-right memes of 2014-2015 and Trump phrases like "covfefe," "nipples protruding," and "amazing woman who led an amazing life" emerged from distinct personalities, not algorithms. Typing words into ChatGPT doesn't reach the level of cultural impact achieved by those Pepe modifications that actually changed the world.
Some sad sacks and naysayers cheer when industries change and jobs disappear, especially if they were fields for which they had no talent or inclination. Let them. Technology has always disrupted work, and new opportunities emerge. However, the real threat isn't unemployment—it's that the young shitposting artist never takes up his e-pencil. It's that we outsource not just the labor but the imagination itself.
The AI dead end arrives when people lose even the creativity to tell the machine what porn they want. "Gimme goon stuff" followed by passive acceptance of whatever appears. The female muscle morphers I interviewed in 2017 didn't just consume images—they created them, however crudely. The badness of their photoshops was evidence of human hands, even if the technological mediation had caused most of them to lose sight of what attracted them to these images in the first place.
Desire drives creation. Machines produce without yearning, without the perverse pleasure that comes from warping reality to match impossible fantasies. When AI does the warping for us, the fantasy itself becomes hollow, stripped of the human touch that made it meaningful.
What does "impossible" mean to a machine that can generate any image?
"ChatGPT, what's an AI image prompt no one has thought of that will go viral?"
The machine will try to answer because that's what machines do. But its response isn't creative —it's assembled from patterns it observed in our past creativity. The person typing isn't being creative either. They're outsourcing imagination itself.
"ChatGPT, show me a person or thing that will arouse me, anything at all. Please hurry. I’m dying here."
This is the final stage of automation—not when machines take our jobs, but when they take our curiosity, our capacity to want specific things rather than general categories of experience. When we can no longer articulate what we desire, we've surrendered the last human territory.
And then society crumbles. Not with revolution or apocalypse, but with a cursor blinking on a blank screen, waiting for a question that nobody remembers how to ask. A screensaver will protect the HD monitors, but we flawed, stupid humanzees are out of luck.