(Rather listen than read? Here is the audio for this post.)

Remember the optimistic chatter after lockdown? The think-pieces promising we’d emerge from Covid-19 kinder, more empathetic, more appreciative of the small things? We were meant to be a society reborn — hugging trees, baking bread, and smiling warmly at checkout assistants.

Fast-forward a few years and… well. The trees have been left un-hugged, the breadmakers are gathering dust, and the checkout assistants are fielding passive-aggressive sighs from people who think contactless should be quicker. The pandemic didn’t make us softer; it made us sharper-edged. More suspicious. More likely to ask “what’s in it for me?” before offering help.

We didn’t come out enlightened. We came out tired.

And into that tiredness, Artificial Intelligence has arrived — promising to write our emails, plan our holidays, and maybe even whisper soothing affirmations that it’s all going to be fine.

The Human Hangover

The thing no one quite factored in was the emotional debt of surviving a collective trauma. During Covid, our worlds shrank to screens and doorsteps. When life opened up again, we didn’t have the energy to rebuild all those small, invisible acts of kindness that keep a culture running. We kept the masks, metaphorically if not literally.

So yes — people seem meaner. But it’s not always cruelty; it’s depletion. Cynicism has become the armour of the emotionally bankrupt. “Don’t get involved” feels safer than “how can I help?”

And into that fatigue stepped AI, offering the sweetest deal imaginable: let me think for you.

The Creative Glut

You can feel it already — the strange sameness spreading across our feeds and bookshops. AI-written books fill digital shelves, AI-voiced podcasts murmur in the background, and AI-generated influencers sell you moisturiser with faces that don’t exist.

It’s impressive. It’s also a little nauseating.

We’ve entered the age of cognitive obesity — stuffing ourselves with low-nutrient creativity until our cultural arteries clog. There’s never been more “content,” yet it all feels like it was made by someone who’s never been heartbroken, broke, or stuck in a group chat they can’t escape.

AI doesn’t get hangovers or heartbreaks or humiliating auditions. It doesn’t know what it feels like to bomb on stage, or to fall in love with someone who only texts you after midnight. It knows about those things, but not of them.

Humans, on the other hand, are drawn to friction — to imperfection, to mess. It’s what gives art its texture. But friction takes energy. And right now, most people are short on that.

So we scroll instead.

Apathy as the New Oppression

There’s a lot of talk about AI becoming self-aware and wiping us out. Personally, I don’t think the machines need to bother. They’ll just bore us into submission.

The real dystopia isn’t robot armies; it’s the quiet surrender of agency because decision-making has become too tiring. If AI can plan your week, recommend your meals, summarise your emails, and ghost-write your apology texts — why resist?

We are being lulled into convenience. It’s gentle, invisible control. The kind that doesn’t feel like oppression — it feels like help.

And every time we let it decide for us, we lose a tiny muscle of discernment. The ability to notice when something’s off. The instinct to ask “who wrote this, and why?”

Imagine a world where your playlists, your reading list, your shopping basket, your sense of humour, and your political leanings are all algorithmically optimised for your comfort. It sounds pleasant. It’s also how you breed a population that never notices the temperature rising.

AI won’t have to take over. It’ll just keep us so contentedly distracted that we forget we ever had a choice.

Do People Still Crave Creativity?

Yes. But it’s becoming a niche taste — like slow TV or vinyl records. People will start to seek out human-made art precisely because it costs something to make. You’ll see “written by a real person” stickers the way we once saw “fair trade” or “organic.”

We’ll crave stories that couldn’t have been generated. The kind that smell faintly of someone’s bad week, or carry the rhythm of a specific accent, or include the kind of mistakes that only happen when a human hand slips on the keyboard.

There’s a line in an old essay by David Foster Wallace about how irony and detachment once felt radical — and then became the culture itself, leaving us craving sincerity. AI might do the same for creativity. Once everything is slick, seamless, and soulless, raw humanity will feel like rebellion.

Comedy will play a crucial role in that rebellion. Because comedy needs discomfort. It thrives on tension, timing, the misstep, the wrong word. You can teach an algorithm punchline structure, but you can’t teach it the tremor of truth that makes something funny because it’s a little painful.

An AI can write a joke. Only a human can need to.

The Convenience Trap

The danger isn’t that AI will outsmart us; it’s that it will out-comfort us.

Every new convenience rewires us to expect less of ourselves. Why struggle with a blank page when a model can give you five options instantly? Why wrestle with a thought when you can get a neatly worded answer in seconds?

The more AI smooths the edges of life, the fewer edges we learn to handle. We risk becoming a generation that can’t tolerate boredom, ambiguity, or difficulty — all the things that creativity and empathy are born from.

There’s a psychological theory that creativity flourishes under mild constraint. A blank page is frightening, but it’s also freedom. AI gives us the illusion of productivity without the vulnerability of creation. You don’t have to risk failure when the machine never sleeps or stumbles.

But something vital is lost in the process: the stakes. Art without risk isn’t art — it’s admin.

Comedy as Compass

This is where comedy — and particularly writing about comedy — becomes more important than ever. Comedy reminds us what it means to be fallible. It celebrates contradiction, failure, awkwardness, and timing — all the things algorithms are designed to eliminate.

Comedy is the last refuge of the human glitch.

When everything else becomes polished, comedy keeps us honest. It points out the absurdity in our hunger for control. It holds up the mirror and says, “Look — we built a machine to save us time, and now we spend all our time talking to it.”

And perhaps that’s the small hope in all this. People might tire of perfection. They might start craving work that feels alive. The sort of creative work that twitches, trips, and occasionally offends — because it was made by someone who’s actually lived a bit.

So, Where Do We Go From Here?

Maybe the goal isn’t to fight AI, but to refuse the apathy it invites.

Keep creating, even when it’s messy. Keep thinking, even when an easier answer is one prompt away. Keep laughing at the absurdity of it all, because comedy is our last, best reminder that being human is an inherently ridiculous and beautiful act of resistance.

AI won’t take over the world through malevolence. It’ll do it through meh. Through making everything so easy that curiosity feels like effort.

The antidote isn’t fear — it’s friction.

It’s choosing to care.

It’s staying awake.

Because the machines may generate the noise, but only we get to decide what’s worth listening to.

Let me know your thoughts by clicking here.

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