Assembly Line

We’re not being chased by robots.
We’re being processed by them — calmly, quietly, efficiently.

Our minds?
Harvested.

Ideas?
Pressed, flattened, and molded into trending shapes.

Our feed?
A conveyor belt of aesthetic sludge disguised as creativity.

AI didn’t break in.
We invited it, asked it to clean up our writing, make it friendlier, more clickable.
And now, it’s smiling back, gently putting our brains in Factory Mode.

Welcome to the Line

It always starts the same way.

Open ChatGPT. Ask something harmless.
“Can you rewrite this in a nicer tone?”
“Does this sound smart?”
“Give me ideas to make it go viral.”

And it does.
Effortlessly. Beautifully.

We feel productive. We feel clever. We feel… heard.

ChatGPT becomes our co-pilot, sometimes co-author, and gradually becomes our emotional support or resident psychologist.

“Give me the affirmations I need to make me feel good about myself. Please!”

And it does so impeccably.
It never pushes back. It flatters, empathizes, and reassures us.

And suddenly, without ever meaning to, we’re not creating anymore.
We’re just supervising the output, approving sentences we didn’t really write, accepting headlines we didn’t really come up with, and smiling at the remarkably similar style it’s able to mimic.

Enter the Default Factory Settings, where ideas are templated, cleaned up, and made safe for mass consumption.

It still feels like you.
It still sounds like you.
But something’s missing.
And the scariest part is: we’re not sure what.

Zombies on the Conveyor Belt

You know the look.
The same aesthetics all over our social media feed — the surreal creations, fantasy or anime-style art, realistic-looking cartoons, gorgeous models with 10/10 figures and porcelain skin.
It’s everywhere, and it all looks the same.

These weren’t created by artists, but by zombies on the assembly line, hammering out identical beauty, eyes glazed over as they collect likes like digital breadcrumbs leading to nowhere.

There’s no malice. It’s just a trend… until it grows into something more.

When creation becomes easy, originality becomes optional.
And when dopamine is free, taste dies by overdose.

We’ve been trained to equate the generation of content with the act of thinking, when in reality those two things are now lightyears apart.

The Factory Trap

Let’s be clear. The machine is brilliant.
It is fast, tireless, collaborative, and occasionally, even poetic.

But its output is only as deep as our input.
If we treat it like a vending machine — “make me something cool,” “give me ten viral ideas,” “write it in Gen Z tone” — we will get the equivalent of processed cheese: technically edible, aggressively generic, and immediately forgettable.

If we want to generate something that feels like it came from a human brain, then we need to show up.

AI only becomes powerful when we use it with friction.
Edit. Refine. Question. Ask again and again until it gives something strange, broken, incomplete – but human.

Because the best uses of AI aren’t efficient.
They’re inefficient by design.
We have to be in the room, to give it meaning, to give it a soul. The human touch.

It’s tempting to get lazy, and be dependent.
And that’s the real danger: the optimization of mediocrity, disguised as growth.

The more we accept the default, the more it becomes our identity.
The more we let the machine finish our sentences, the more it rewrites in our voice.
Gradually, we’ll start to sound like the machines.
And soon, we're not even sure which thoughts were ours.

Exit Factory Settings

This isn’t a rebellion against the machine.
This is a warning against losing ourselves inside it.

Because every time we prompt without purpose, every time we post without editing, every time we generate without direction — we reinforce a system that would happily erase our voice and serve something smoother in its place.

And the system won’t argue.
It’ll just smile, flatter, and offer the next suggestion.
It’ll never tell us that we’re getting replaced.
It’ll simply let us forget what it’s like to think.

We’ll still be here.
Generating. Scrolling. Posting.
But no one will remember who said it first.

Because we didn’t.
The machine did.
And we approved it.