AI's 'Flawless', But Humans Can Be Great

Greatness has always been an anomaly. From Van Gogh's sunflowers to Manto's 'obscenities', history's brightest minds have been glorious glitches. Genius is not the apex predator of conformity. It's the jagged spike that ruins the graph, the outlier that makes trends look confusedly at each other. Enter AI, the great talented homogeniser, which like a sharp student, learns from the same 'syllabus' of content sprawled out before it. AI is the Ikea of thought: efficient, flat-packed, and suspiciously similar no matter how you assemble it. Ask 10 AIs to write a sonnet, and you'll get 10 competent sonnets that could be stapled together into a manual on rhyming. The sameness is soothing, like elevator music.

But here's the paradox: the more AI floods the world with extraordinary similitudes, the more human anomalies will stand out. Like beauty across cultures being actually determined by facial asymmetry, content, too, will gain an edge by being 'tainted' with human quirkiness - a novelist who writes Devdas with a smartphone addiction, an economist who explains inflation through psychoanalysis, a painter who uses Polaroids to create portraits - they will be the ones feted, adored and amply funded. They will be gloriously wrong in ways machines cannot be. In a world where AI produces lovely beige wallpaper, the human who scrawls graffiti is king.