The Tools Around Me

The tools around me
have changed over the years.

Notepad.
Paint.
WordArt titles
warped beyond recognition
on school projects
we swore looked cool at the time.

Now the names are bigger.

ChatGPT.
CoPilot.
Grok.

Machines humming somewhere far away
while the internet argues
about whether creativity is dying.

But creativity
was never the machine.

Creativity was always us.

It was hands on cave walls.
Paint under fingernails,
Words scratched into paper
because someone, somewhere,
needed to say:

“I was here.”

We have always used tools.

What changed
is that people stopped seeing them
as tools.

Now we scroll past
Farage in a military jacket
shaking Churchill’s hand on the moon.

Starmer with a baby’s body
pointing at charts
with six fingers.

Posters where everybody
has the same hollow smile,
the same polished skin,
the same dead eyes
staring through you.

And people point and laugh:
“AI slop.”

And honestly?
Sometimes they’re right.

Because bad use
is loud.

It leaves fingerprints everywhere.

But the good use?

The good use disappears.

It’s the email
someone finally had the confidence to send.

The payroll hours
finally worked out properly.

The community project
explained clearly enough
for someone to understand why it matters.

The emotional mess
in somebody’s head
becoming a poem
another person feels in their chest.

Not replacement.

Guidance.

Not a machine
having human experiences,

but humans
finally having better ways
to express them.

Because when the tool fades into the background,
what’s left
is still us.