2024 was supposed to be the year AI assistants became genuinely useful in everyday life. Instead, we got something more interesting: the year AI became deeply weird.
I'm not talking about the chatbots themselves—those have gotten impressively capable. I'm talking about how we're using them. A colleague recently told me he argues with ChatGPT about his therapy sessions. Not using it to reflect, mind you. Actually arguing with it about whether his therapist's advice was sound. Another friend asks Claude to roleplay as her deceased grandmother to help her process grief. A developer I know has his AI assistant write his standup updates in increasingly absurd voices—last week it was a film noir detective.
This isn't what anyone predicted. The discourse was all about job displacement and whether AI would replace writers or programmers. We spent months debating whether these tools were "truly intelligent." Meanwhile, people just started... using them. And using them in ways that have nothing to do with productivity.