< the skull

THE FIRST TIME THE MACHINE LOOKED BACK
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2026-05-17

I still remember the first time I saw ChatGPT.

It was around November 2022, and there was something strangely beautiful about
it. Not beautiful in the polished, product-design sense. Beautiful because it
felt unfinished in the right way — rough, limited, occasionally wrong, but
carrying the unmistakable smell of the future.

It was nowhere near what it is today. And even today, it is nowhere near what I
imagine it will become.

One small detail fascinated me: the notice at the bottom of the screen. It told
you up to which point its knowledge had been “synced” with reality. That felt
almost poetic. Back then, the warning was not centered around hallucinations,
mistakes, or the platform’s own unreliability. The mood was different. ChatGPT
was treated as something close to unbeatable, almost mythological.

Claude would only show up as a serious contender about a year later. Most
companies were not even publicly dreaming of having their own large language
models. For a brief moment, ChatGPT did not feel like one AI product among many.
It felt like the event.

And still, my enthusiasm was not naive. I could see the gaps. I could see the
limitations. But none of that reduced the scale of what had just happened.

The real shock came when, in that same November of 2022, I asked ChatGPT what it
knew about Pablo Murad.

It did not have internet access. It did not have live information. It was not
connected to the present. And yet, somehow, it answered with maybe 40% accuracy.

To most people, 40% would sound like failure.

To me, it was enough.

I looked at Samuel, my marketing lead at the time, and said: “Man, the future of
search is going to be AI.”

He laughed. He disagreed. Samuel is a skeptic by instinct.

The funny part is that just yesterday we were working on how AI perceives us —
how it reads, ranks, interprets, and represents who we are. I reminded him of
that moment. He laughed again. Not because it was absurd anymore, but because it
had become obvious.

That is the strange thing about good predictions: they usually sound ridiculous
before they sound inevitable.

Four years ago, this felt almost impossible.

Now, here we are, all preparing for the AI wave.

And this wave is not just another technological upgrade. AI will shape the
algorithm. In many cases, it will become the algorithm. It will influence how
people search, write, buy, learn, code, create, and decide what deserves
attention.

I do not see this as something purely dystopian. Some changes are not threats;
they are the natural consequence of a system becoming more efficient. I am not
conservative enough to be angry at AI. Quite the opposite: I find it
extraordinary.

I also do not believe the simplistic idea that AI will merely “replace humans.”
That is too lazy a reading.

What will happen is more interesting.

Humans will move.

Programmers will become engineers of intelligent systems. Writers will become
managers of language. Artists will become creative directors of machines capable
of producing endless variations. The human role will shift away from raw
execution and toward intent, judgment, taste, and direction.

But there is one part that still unsettles me: human emotion in contact with
synthetic creation.

The other day, I saw an elderly man enjoying a song made by AI. That stayed with
me. Not because the song was bad. Not because it was artificial. But because it
raised a harder question: if something synthetic can touch a real memory, awaken
a real sadness, or create a real sense of beauty, then where exactly does the
human part begin?

If we reduce AI to “if” and “then,” we miss the scale of what is happening. Yes,
underneath it all, there is structure, probability, computation. But from enough
structure, enough probability, and enough computation, something begins to
resemble meaning.

Maybe we are all living through a practical version of the infinite monkey
theorem.

Except the monkeys are models, the typewriters are data centers, and the
accidental Shakespeare is no longer accidental. It is optimized, predicted, and
delivered in milliseconds.

That is what I felt back in November 2022.

Not that the machine had arrived fully formed.

But that, for the first time, it had looked back.


< the skull