The Golden Question in the AI Era

My simple essay on knowing whether to use AI or not.

January 5, 2026•Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

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AI dominated the market. Which market, you ask? Every market. It has infiltrated the web, tools, games and our lives. I felt like I needed to write something to bring myself the clarity to know when to use it. I'm not at all questioning deeply complex usages of AI, I leave the ones using it for scientific purposes to get to their own conclusions. I'm much more concerned about our daily use of it.

Before we truly begin, this is neither a pro-AI or against AI piece. I see AI as another inexorable technological advance, much as the internet or electricity. Electricity spread initially to illuminate our cities, it was a matter of survival and security. The internet came as means to globally connect to others, to improve and strenghten our sense of global community. "What's the purpose of AI, then?", one might ask. We don't know. The internet was not initially created having social network and videocalls in mind. Nor the electricity as the most basic resource we need in our daily lives, be it to ride cars, surf the web or power up the internet.

The expectation for AI, however, is often, imprecedently misplaced. We're hearing AI company CEOs talking about the AI curing cancer, solving global warming, hunger, all of our problems, as if a magical solution had been created and sent from the gods to us. This is very similar to the feeling we've had when big technological and scientific breakthroughs happened. That's ok too, we're beings of dream and hope, we're bounded and motivated by our ideas of having a better life and future.

But I digress, AI might helps solve some of these problems, sure, I don't mean to deny its amazing potential and that's not what this article is about. Let's talk about why should we be using AI for right now.

Research

Sometimes, things happen in life and you feel the urge to research something. It can be something silly like the name of an actress you like, something serious as news regarding the local politics in your country or something in the middle like researching information about the medicine you're taking because you don't want to read the box. I love this use of AI and Google was genious when they embedded Gemini to the search. Many of my friends had already left Google as a research platform and were using ChatGPT instead. Google was fast enough to kind of break that and retain their traffic. But I always keep in mind what Kurszesagt brought up on this amazing video about AI slop.

I really recommend the video, but one of the main points of it is that AI will create content when it finds necessary, whether it's because it didn't find a piece of information or it thinks that it's necessary to please us. The video talks about how, during their use of AI for research, they noticed that about 80% of what AI brought up was based on real sources, 20% made up. To make things worse, inside that 80% of supposedly trustworthy material there was AI generated content, meaning that it was possibly (if not certainly) affected by other AI slop.

Tip: do not trust AI blindly and assume only 80% is real. Never stop fact checking.

Development

Even when building this website, I started it by requesting the AI to create a simple React.js + Next.js webapp using best practices, NextJS App Router, Tailwind, etc. I simple set of instructions allowed the AI to create a first version of it that was satisfying enough for me to work from it to get it where I wanted it fast. It didn't replace my creation process, but sped it up by performing the simple initial tasks to start up and setup a project. AI as an intern that I cannot afford for a personal website I'm building as a hobby.

A cartoonist that I love created this great and funny comic about AI and art work, where it talks about how concerning is the idea of replacing artistic work with AI work. How when you see some art, no matter how amazing it is, when someone tells you it's AI generated, the sparkles of it immediately fade away. It's not that we don't think it's amazing or fun, but it becomes less valuable. The Sistine Chapel is not just simply incredible because it's beautiful or big, when we see it and learn about it, it's amazing to think that Michelangelo painted for years with crazy twisted and painful body positions, very high ladders and scaffolding, paint dripping on his eyes. Years depositing this pain, emotion, hard work into an art piece. AI art is painless, it's emotionless. What AI creates reduces the value of itself, because it diminishes the effort put into it.

I highly recommend both the Kurszesagt's video and The Oatmeal's comic above. They are insightful and funny. I'm linking them below this article as well so you don't have to stop reading it.

Tip: value real art made by humans and always try to understand or feel the emotions the art brings you. That's what art is for: no purpose but to feel.

Other Usages

AI has began reading our emails, draft replies, creating content, improve messaging, shortcutting your research, understand your behaviour and more. These applications are all due to the great hype that comes with AI, the promises that I mentioned earlier. But how much should you be using AI in your daily life? That's the golden question, we're done here.

No, I'm kidding, of course it's not. But that is the question that many of us are asking ourselves because we feel compelled to use AI and at the same time we're usually a little afraid of it.

To simplify my life I usually think about using AI in two specific ways:

Simplify our lives: executing chores we don't want to, gradually replace the manual labour we've endured for centuries in order to set us a bit more free to do art or entertain ourselves
Entertainment: having fun with it, instead of relying on it to be something super serious

But even though I believe in #1, I don't think we should be using it to replace our own research process, to create our papers or to do our homework. And even though I believe in #2, I don't believe we should always use AI for content creation, nor that it will replace engineers, designers or artists.

The Golden Question

The golden question I have when I'm about to use AI is this: is AI powering what you're looking for or replacing it?

Now let's deep dive into why this is such a valuable question in our current times. Spoiler alert: it's not about keeping people's jobs and not hurting the market.

The value of the question lies on the simple fact that if AI is replacing your need, then you should probably look into ways it can power it.

Let's look at some examples:

In a world without AI, I'm not hiring someone to create text messaging group photos for me. Ever. So why not use AI to generate something? In a world without AI, I wouldn't hire someone to do it because I don't have the budget for it and I wouldn't do it myself because I don't have the time. I would probably look for a picture in the web. With AI, I can create the image I want, no effort, with the benefit of its likelihood to make mistakes and create something impossible will be even better or funnier. So it's powering my research and making it a lot faster.

In a world without AI, I'm either hiring someone to edit my photo for a professional purpose or I'm doing it myself if I have the time and capabilities. In my personal case, I'm more likely to trust my wife (a photographer) with it. She'll do an excellent job powered, but not ruled, by AI. The same way that I code and develop powered by AI assistants, but never replaced by it.

In a world without AI, I'm not copying an article that I want to share and posting on my own. I could hire writers and editors to organize my thoughts into something readable or I could write it myself. Technology would only have a place on simple grammar checks, so that's what AI might do (at the most). It'll power up my ability to write in any language. I'm not asking AI to write content for me or even tell me how to express my ideas because I want to ensure quality, tone and emotions.

In a world without AI, I would choose and curate the art I want in my home, or hire someone I trust to help me with it, as I want things that make sense to me. I want art that either matches my home or feelings I have. So I won't put AI art in my wall. If I'm creating art, I might use AI to help me in the process, as long as I don't feel like it's directing my work and polluting my art. It could power the creation process when testing colors, changing things quickly to see different outcomes.

In a world without AI, you hire people to choose and think the design of your app, your website, your home. Each of these professionals might be powered by AI themselves, but replacing them would carry a risk that you shouldn't take.

In a world without AI, you would spend some time looking up songs and building your Spotify playlist, you can easily try it with AI without cost and risk. It'll power your ability to create quick lists to listen while you work.

Conclusion

Science fiction has already predicted countless times how AI takes over mankind. I'm not afraid of it, right now. But my conclusions about AI seeing how the world is changing actually make me think that this doesn't look like a scenario we will even want to try. Different from the industrial revolution, when machines replaced humans and humans had to specialize in new jobs, AI doesn't look like it has come to take the place of humans. Super computers have, in the way that they can replace the processing power of lots of humans in an organized way. But the AI looks like it's here to change each job, tweak every aspect of our lives and leaving us humans with more time to do the silly things, play around, have fun.

So if you're doing something soon and thinking about using AI, I ask you this: are you replacing what you want entirely with what AI decides or powering yourself with it? If you're hiring and you are thinking whether you should have or have AI to do something for you, I ask you this: are you replacing someone with AI or are you hiring someone powered by it that can take you and you company beyond your wildest dreams?