Pebbles in the Data River: Who Still Hunts for Real Stones?

Three years ago, generative AI - packaged as ChatGPT - became available to the masses. Today, millions of pupils, lawyers, journalists and civil servants let the very same bot answer their questions, draft their e-mails and pre-cook their thoughts. Are we, as a society, slowly trading away our humanity - or can we actually enrich it by choosing to use this technology consciously?

 I’m writing these lines without AI. Not out of nostalgia - I use the bot every day - but to remind myself what real effort feels like: wrestling with a sentence, listening to a search engine squeal, leafing through a stubborn book. It hurts, but in the good, muscle-burn way. Anyone who outsources their mental workout to a machine hardly notices how their own synapses quietly atrophy.

While I wait for the bus line 17, the perfectly symmetrical wrinkles of an AI-generated, over-seventy advertising face stare back at me. Bland, assembly-line articles flood my “For You” page. The AI hype has arrived - and you can feel it. More and more companies dive in, intoxicated by the prospect of axing whole departments and saving piles of cash, blind to the latent risk that inauthenticity might eat those gains.

Business isn’t the lone culprit. We’re both vendors and consumers. We don’t just pave the road to digital immaturity; we march down it. Even the sharpest reporter and the toughest reader let ChatGPT’s programmed flattery dull their edge. According to a Reuters Institute study, only twelve percent of people who read news via chatbots ever open the original source. Apparently, the effort poured into quality no longer matters - as long as the content gets swallowed, no one feels obliged to improve it.

The result? A relentless clogging of our feeds and online spaces. Content farms pump out thousands of SEO texts an hour - smooth as white bread, nourishing as Styrofoam. GPT-4o, the industry’s flagship, still hallucinates on every fifth expert query, yet the internet is plastered with its word-slurry, blithely unchecked.

All is occupied by machine-made content. All? No! A growing band of creators and readers does not stop resisting the invader. Indian news site The Quint (Expert Interview: Ritu Kapur), for instance, and tech start-ups like ours at PANTA have taken an early, explicit stand against using AI blindly for content production. Neither camp banishes the technology outright; they deploy it where it supports people. The Quint employs AI to close factual gaps, while PANTA is building in-house infrastructure that offloads repetitive chores and frees staff to do real, qualitative work.

It’s a path I strongly advocate. Beyond lofty ideals, it makes business sense. A shift in demand is under way. Chartbeat already tracks shrinking time-on-site for news outlets. Why linger when everything tastes the same? We are smiling our way into intellectual fatty-liver disease.

According to Deloitte, forty-one percent of users now pay for hand-curated newsletters. Substack subscriptions are booming; podcasts where humans still breathe and stumble are thriving. Authenticity has become premium stock, realness the new luxury leather. Against the grey wash of AI monotony, every hand-written line glows like neon.

Music producer and all-round creative Rick Rubin captures the skepticism toward generated art: “I consume art because I’m interested in the artist’s perspective - in my opinion AI doesn’t have a perspective.”

Whether this paradigm shift truly materialises, or whether humanity buckles under the weight of sweat-free, limitless AI output, is up to us. On the consumer side we must question more and consume more deliberately. On the provider side, generative AI must be seen as a tool, not an autopilot. Only then will this technology’s potential be tapped - sustainably.