Hey flesh-and-blood beings. Happy Monday. A lot of people seem to hate Monday, but at least you get this email! Hope it brightens things up for you.
You’re reading Please Stay Human, the newsletter filtering out the nasty depressing stuff and showing you how to live in the face of AI.
And help out another soul: forward this email to somebody you know who’s worried about AI.
Inequality can be a good thing.
For a long time, humans have been unequal.
I mean this in the sense of being different from one another. This is a very good thing. One person might be exceptional at computer programming, another a genius at art, still another a brilliant chef.
These are skills they have studied and built up with care. In becoming masters of these skills, each person becomes different from the others, standing out for a special reason.
And then along comes AI.
And anybody at all can do anything at all, without first having to study or practice or spend years upon years mastering a skill.
It feels unfair, but what it’s really doing is deleting the very idea of unfair. And unfairness is a big part of what makes life fun. You have to strive, and struggle, and try hard to do things. It’s not fair, because each person has to build themselves up from nothing.
But with AI, one day you won’t have to. Anything you want to be good at, you can. Right away.
Which leaves an interesting question.
How do you reclaim your unfairness?
Get good at a thing.
Learn things anyway. There are still so many things that we do better than the bots.
Writing. Painting. Music. Anything people do.
Work on getting good at something. Anything! Develop a skill you can one day be proud of, even in the face of AI.
This is how we stay human.
Scraping the sky
There are a lot of amazing things in the modern world, and not all of them are computers.
Completed in only one year and forty-five days, the Empire State Building [link | interestingness level: 5/5] is a marvel of engineering. Workers completed on average 4 floors every week, allowable through meticulous planning and assembly-line type processes.
While it’s no longer the tallest building, the engineering and speed of its construction are incredible, made possible by the thousands of (human) workers that built it.
Like this guy:
AI is getting really good at mimicking the real world, but still hasn’t lost the “AI” look [link | interestingness level: 5/5]
A team at Amazon enters the AI coding race [link | interestingness level: 3/5]
AI object and people consistency across images is getting too good [link | interestingness level: 2/5]
“Vibe coding” is when somebody makes AI write most of the code for an app. It often turns out badly…
finally, we now know what new jobs AIs are creating
— #Ky-Nam (#@withkynam)
7:36 AM • Aug 17, 2025
Hey, we’re Please Stay Human. Our goal is to help you face the reality of an AI-powered world while totally having a great time.
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This email is by humans, for humans, so if you know somebody who’s feeling the loom of AI, please forward this to them.
Every single word in this newsletter was typed by fleshy human fingers on plastic Macbook keyboards. We make a lot of mistakes and fix most of them.
