As tweens from the 2000s, we were taught to carry our phones nearby because a phone could be a lifeline if something went wrong.
From my perspective, it created a casual relationship to technology at our fingertips, that evolved and grew as we did. There was very little mention of online protection, except occasional whispers of anonymous chatrooms and the ‘Dark Web’, not that they were advertised nor meant much to an individual that simply saw tech as fun and new.
The social media boom came later, as we matured into young adulthood and entered the working world. Time was rarely spent playing with Microsoft Paint, Sims or , instead it moved towards productivity, attempting to stand-out or use the latest “in” Apps for image-editing, social sharing and diarising.
As far as I am concerned, the internet, social platforms and gaming from the early 2000s to today has morphed and fluctuated as much as much as the weather has, yet there are still undertones and through-threads that early technology adopters continue to acknowledge.
Is it the churning and constant change that we cannot avert our eyes from, the only modern-living source of perpetual energy? Sure, if the electricity were to cease, it wouldn’t be that, but I’m alluding to a different kind of energy, a Zeitgeist of some kind.
That hard-to-define thing has been “disrupted” once again. A term that became familiar to me when it became a way for marketers to describe a particular kind of content creator or influencer in the mid-2010s. They were individuals who bypassed traditional gatekeepers in mainstream fashion, culture and entertainment to amass millions of followers.
As a digital marketing specialist/strategist, discernment, the digital economy and the value of attention became topics of debate, with few concrete answers. Do plumbers need to be the Magic Mikes of Instagram for attention? Does content-focused attention matter when trying to attract business? Experiments ensued across the digital “playing fields”; what was once clear-cut became a cacophony of virtue signalling, charades and suffocation for the truly expressive.
It’s been a disappointment to admit I’ve been part of that messy digital evolution, as well as a rejector of experimental testing all in the good name of ‘Marketing Fair Practice’. A method of remaining critical of the intention behind content.
I know that I’m not the only one to witness the struggle with the Zeitgeist, as broken algorithms, education and false-promise determine your feed-of-the-day and the latest in public “breakaway” from being social media/tech dependent – your personalised A.I.
Where best-practice decisions and experiments are being faced less, movies like ‘Her’ a near reality, industry and people lean towards artificial intelligence, large language models, image generation, etc.
AI as a chatbot → AI as a creative tool → AI as a co-pilot → AI as an agent → AI as an autonomous worker.
Below is an AI ranking of popular 2026 AI platforms, all with infinite potential to create, replicate and “make things easier”.
| Rank | Platform | Core LLM / Reasoning | Image Generation | Video Generation | Voice / Audio | Research / Web | Agentic Work | Coding / Software Agents | Best described as |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ChatGPT / OpenAI | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | Best all-round AI platform |
| 2 | Claude / Anthropic | ★★★★★ | — | — | — | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | Reasoning, writing & agentic coding |
| 3 | Gemini / Google | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★☆ | Best multimodal + Google ecosystem |
| 4 | Cursor | ★★★★★* | — | — | — | ★★★★☆ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★+ | AI-native software development |
| 5 | Microsoft Copilot | ★★★★★ | ★★★★☆ | ★★★☆☆ | ★★★★☆ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★☆ | Enterprise productivity & automation |
| 6 | Perplexity | ★★★★☆ | ★★☆☆☆ | — | ★★★☆☆ | ★★★★★+ | ★★★★☆ | ★★★☆☆ | AI research / search |
| 7 | Grok / xAI | ★★★★★ | ★★★★☆ | ★★★★☆ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★☆ | ★★★★☆ | Real-time information + multimodal AI |
| 8 | Midjourney | ★★☆☆☆ | ★★★★★+ | ★★★★☆ | — | — | ★★☆☆☆ | — | Creative image generation |
| 9 | Runway | ★★★☆☆ | ★★★★☆ | ★★★★★+ | ★★★☆☆ | — | ★★★★☆ | — | AI video production |
| 10 | Adobe Firefly | ★★★★☆ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★☆ | — | ★★★★☆ | — | Commercial creative production |
I’d call my dating attempts with A.I. frivolous, but not as disappointing as marrying one.
My current notes on A.I:
– Comparison is good. “Shop around”; they shouldn’t take it personally.
– Pretending that you don’t use technology or that you don’t benefit from it is a lie.
– Don’t bring your AI into casual conversations.
– Don’t automate your job before the age of 80.
– Don’t abandon self-expression just because “every A.I.” could do it better.
There is much more to be said about the changes we are witnessing in tech-favouring, information disintermediation and the adjustments in consumer/user behaviour, but I’ll mention that if a client insists on hitting all Meta content-frequency goals, being brand-present on all platforms and refuses to extend the budget to visual design, then I’ll insist on A. I. for the very human bandwidth I possess.
