4. The Journey People Take

Chapter 4: The Journey People Take. Read by Helen

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After the cube failure, I wanted to understand what had happened to me.

Not just the embarrassment of it. All of it. I'd been somewhere where I’d felt productive, confident, and generative. And then I was somewhere else entirely, unable to explain my own thinking. The transition happened without my noticing.

When we started mapping how people adapt to AI, I realized I wasn't alone. There's a path through this territory. It's not straight. People double back, skip stages, get stuck. But there are five places people find themselves.

Knowing them helps you see where you are.

The Wake-Up

The Wake-Up is when you realize AI can do something you didn't expect. My Wake-Up was embarrassingly simple. GPT-3, before ChatGPT even existed. I asked it to write a haiku.

That was it. A haiku. Looking back it's so 2022 I almost don't want to admit it. But language had always been the thing I was watching for. This was the unlock everyone in AI had been talking about for years. And when I read that haiku I thought: it's here.

I was the same as everyone else. Showing people. "Look at this." Not sure what it meant yet, just knowing something was different.

For a blind user, it happened in a restaurant bathroom: "They had no Braille on the restroom sign. I took a picture with my phone, had ChatGPT analyze it and it told me 'women's,' so I knew to go to the men's on the left."

A university lecturer captured the strangeness of first contact: "More like an extremely clever entity spitballing but not always remembering what it is discussing."

The Wake-Up can be wonder, fear, or both at once. Before, AI was an abstraction. After, it's real and it changes something about what's possible.

Some people circle The Wake-Up for months—returning to that initial amazement or dread without moving forward. Others pass through so quickly they barely notice it.