I’ve been accused recently — with a certain nervous laughter — of being a pessimist about AI.
People point to my pieces about job collapse, social upheaval, or the small matter of AI accidentally ending civilisation, and ask:
“Harry… mate… are you okay?”
And yes. I am. Mostly.
But here’s the thing people miss: I do believe AI will transform everything — perhaps dramatically, perhaps catastrophically — but that is not what this article is about.
Because right now, in this odd little window before the tectonic plates shift, GenAI is doing something gentler, stranger and far more intimate:
It’s reshaping us.
Not humanity in the abstract. You. Me. The stories we’ve told ourselves about who we are and who we’re not.
Whisper it… some of that reshaping is beautiful.
This is my love letter to that part.
Your Identity Was Not Designed for This Century
Most of us carry our identities like badly packed luggage. We didn’t choose half the items inside:
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the praise from one teacher
the criticism from another
the job we coasted into
the hobby we abandoned
the thing we failed at once and quietly avoided forever
These solidify early:
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I’m not creative.
I’m terrible with tech.
I never finish anything.
I don’t have ideas.
I’m not musical / artistic / imaginative.
I’m just not that type of person.
And because adult life is noisy and cramped, we rarely question them. We settle in. We shrink to fit.
Then along comes GenAI — clumsy, brilliant, overeager, occasionally feral — and without meaning to, it taps you on the shoulder and asks:
“Are you sure?”
This Is the Bit That Makes Me Soft
It’s a small question, but the results are quietly seismic.
You write three lines of a story and ask the model to continue — suddenly you’re a writer again.
You hum a tune into your phone and ask it to arrange it — suddenly you’re a composer.
You sketch a character and ask it to paint the scene — suddenly you’re an illustrator.
You ramble an idea out loud and ask it to interrogate you — suddenly you can feel a new version of yourself tugging at your sleeve.
None of this means the machine is creative. It means you were, and you simply needed someone — or something — patient enough to sit with you while the drawer opened.
For many, GenAI is the first encouraging collaborator they’ve had since childhood. It doesn’t judge. It doesn’t sigh. It doesn’t tell you to “be realistic.” It simply follows your thought… wherever it goes.
And in those moments, your beautiful brain gets to be a little bigger than the life wrapped around it.
The Use Cases Aren’t the Point (Though They’re Fun)
Yes, I’ve used GenAI to:
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build an ASMR YouTube channel,
write children’s stories for Theo,
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help my mum start her long-awaited detective novel,
sketch a musical (I know…),
automate enough admin to make my workday feel slightly less Victorian.
But these aren’t the point. They’re just the visible bits of a deeper truth:
GenAI makes the first step so small, so forgiving, that old parts of your identity wake up again.
The playful you. The inventive you. The version of you that once tried things simply because they delighted you. The version unafraid of being slightly ridiculous.
Adults rarely get that self back. But right now, GenAI gives you a doorway.
A Compliment to Your Beautiful Thinking
If you’ve read this far, I suspect something about you.
Your beautiful brain likes to capture shiny and wonderful thoughts and wonders what shape they might take if given half a chance.
GenAI — in its chaotic, adolescent, pre-apocalyptic phase — is surprisingly good at just one thing:
lowering the barrier to beginning.
It doesn’t add beauty. It reveals the beauty you’ve misplaced.
That’s why I love it. Not for the future it threatens. But for the present it unlocks.
Before It Takes Our Jobs… It Might Give Us Ourselves
We may have a few years before GenAI becomes something else entirely. But in this narrow, shimmering window, we can use it as a tool for self-expansion:
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to test identities we once abandoned,
to hear ourselves think again,
to create things we never believed we were allowed to create.
A tool, dare I say it, for more Beautiful Thinking.
Your Turn: Tell Me What It’s Unlocked in You
I’ve shown you mine. Now I’d genuinely love to see yours.
👇 In the comments, tell me: What part of yourself did GenAI hand back? What identity did it loosen? What story about yourself began — even slightly — to shift?
Surprise me. Better yet: surprise yourself.