We know how this whole AI thing ends. We’re doing it anyway.

A viral thought experiment by Billy Baker in The Boston Globe presents a letter from the year 2026, framing the current AI explosion as an inevitable, poorly-plotted story we all saw coming. The piece argues that just as smartphones ended humanity's "age of alone" and captured our collective attention, generative AI models like GPT-4 and Claude are now coming for our second sacred asset: our unique creative voice. The author posits that society is at the precise moment where theoretical fear becomes tangible reality, with no option to opt out of the transformation.

Baker's central, chilling example is his inability to prove he wrote his own article after readers accused him of using AI. This illustrates the core crisis: we are nearing a point where the provenance of human creativity becomes unverifiable. The piece suggests this erosion of trust in authorship is the true tsunami, not physical robot takeovers. It's a critique less about AGI apocalypse and more about the silent, gradual loss of what makes human expression distinct and trustworthy in a world flooded with synthetic content.