John Henry, Photoshop, and the AI Question

The current AI conversation reminds me a lot of the early Photoshop era.

People forget there was a time when digital art tools were considered “fake,” destructive, unethical, or the death of creativity itself. Today, Photoshop is simply part of the professional creative toolkit.

That does not mean every criticism of AI is wrong. Some concerns are absolutely legitimate; labor displacement, exploitative corporate behavior, consent and training-data questions, surveillance systems, deepfakes and manipulation, and concentration of power.

Those are real issues and we should take them seriously.

But I think we also need to separate the technology itself, the business models around it, and the institutions deploying it.

AI is not automatically evil because corporations can misuse it any more than the internet, photography, or industrial machinery were inherently evil technologies.

At the same time, dismissing artists’ concerns entirely is also a mistake.

There is a reason the story of John Henry still resonates so deeply. For anyone unfamiliar, John Henry was the legendary steel-driving man who raced a steam-powered drilling machine during the expansion of the American railroad system. He beat the machine, then died from the effort.

The story was never really about “machines bad.”

It was about dignity. About human worth in the face of mechanization. About the fear that industrial systems might eventually treat people as disposable.

That emotional wound is still alive today.

Human-made work carries meaning because humans made it. People value struggle, experience, intention, craftsmanship, and lived perspective. That matters. “John Henry versus the machine” is still emotionally alive in modern society.

I have also been using AI heavily over the last year, and honestly, it means a great deal to me personally. I am on the spectrum, and these tools have genuinely helped me organize thoughts, externalize ideas, communicate more clearly, and explore concepts in ways that were harder for me before.

At the same time, being close to the technology has also made me brutally aware of the detrimental effects it can have. I understand why artists, workers, and communities are anxious. Some of those fears are absolutely grounded in reality.

What fascinates me is that we are now watching cognition itself industrialize for the first time in human history.

That is not a small cultural adjustment. It is a civilization-scale psychological event.

Personally, I think the healthiest path forward is to protect human dignity, protect labor, create consent and compensation systems, govern AI responsibly, encourage transparency, and still allow humanity to explore what these tools can become.

Because the future probably is not “humans OR AI.”

The future is much more likely humans working with increasingly powerful cognitive tools while society struggles to adapt ethically, economically, and culturally.

I am enthusiastically rooting for humans and AI to educate each other and work together to fix as many problems as we can.

That adaptation process is going to define a lot of the rest of this century.