When I first heard that AI would change the world,
I was genuinely excited.
It really felt like something big was coming.
A system that could cut down on manuals, automate routines,
and turn my raw ideas into action—
I thought maybe this was finally the intelligent assistant I had been waiting for.
When I launched GPT for the first time,
it was half curiosity, half expectation.
I started giving it instructions—
planning tasks, writing outlines, even drafting copy.
But it didn’t take long to realize:
It wasn’t quite there.
The sentences were fluent, sure.
But the context kept breaking.
It couldn’t really follow what I wanted all the way through.
Each question got a reply,
but the conversation as a whole never built up.
The technology was impressive.
But it was impressive in a fragmented way.
Each answer sounded good,
but nothing added up to something I could stack or scale.
Disconnected intelligence.
That’s where the unfamiliarity crept in.
Meanwhile, the world was celebrating.
“AI will do everything for us.”
“All humans need now is creativity.”
Every time I heard that,
I stepped back a little.
Maybe someday, but not now.
And what I had in front of me—
was still just a tool.
A smarter tool, perhaps,
but still a tool.
I wasn’t disappointed.
I had simply overestimated what was possible.
Once I adjusted my expectations,
I could finally start observing this AI more clearly—
how it behaves, how it moves,
what kind of logic it runs on.
That was my real first encounter with AI.
I thought I was meeting a collaborator.
But instead, I found a tool.
And from there,
I became something else:
a user who observes.
That was the root of the unfamiliarity—
the space between what I imagined,
and what actually stood in front of me.