staying human at a machine pace
Hey, I’m Chloe! I’m a senior at NYU Gallatin and I’ve spent the last few years building my own degree around media, business and politics, with a minor in social entrepreneurship.
I have always wanted to sit in that overlap between creativity and problem solving and being ADHD/neurodivergent adds another layer to how I learn, focus and make sense of the world. Right now, I live in New York City and intern at qb., working on marketing and content for a business that thinks a lot about climate, equity and the future of work. From that vantage point, I’ve been trying to understand how AI is imprinting my generation and what it means to walk into post-grad life with the ground already shifting beneath us.
published 4.10.26
In the classroom and in professional spaces, speed has become the quiet metric of success. AI is my silent collaborator; I use it to search, structure and condense, to turn hours of research into something I can actually face on a late Wednesday night. It gives immediate relief from the blank page syndrome. But convenience has a cost. When I let a large language model shorten or organize my thoughts, I am effectively taking out a loan of cognitive debt—I save time today but give up the struggle tomorrow, and that struggle is usually where my most original ideas are born. If I outsource the synthesis of my research, am I really learning, or am I just becoming a high-level curator of machine-shaped thinking?
As a senior staring down a shrinking entry-level job market, the pressure to be perfect is immense. AI promises perfection at speed. Yet once the machine helps shape a sentence, the line of authorship doesn’t just blur; it quietly dissolves. If we all use the same models to polish our prose, we risk a homogenization of thought, a slow drift toward what feels like a beige, frictionless average. Many of my friends who use AI casually frame it as practicality: if the tools exist and everyone else is using them, why would you choose to fall behind? Time is currency, and they are simply being fiscally responsible. Others wear their refusal as a badge of honor, as if writing without AI is now a form of creative weightlifting. For a generation that claims to value authenticity above all else, we’re now in a strange position: outsourcing our voice to keep up with a pace no human set.
The tension isn’t just internal; it’s written across the city. The most honest commentary on AI I see each week isn’t coming from think tanks or panels…it’s happening on the tiled walls of the West 4th Street subway station. Walking to class, I pass AI-generated ads that are systematically defaced, slogans crossed out, faces scratched over, glossy promises tagged with one-word verdicts like “fake” or “soulless.” There is a small but growing social rebellion here, an exhaustion with the constant need to discern what’s real from what’s not. We are craving the safety of the unpolished. That craving shows up in the pivot back toward film photos, vinyl records and the imperfection of handwritten notes, mediums that feel nostalgic, yes, but also safe from optimization.
What emerges is an unspoken social boundary: AI is acceptable as a private assistant but not as a public personality.We might be fine using it to clean up an email or summarize a report, but we resist the idea of AI influencers, AI actors or AI creators who we are expected to compare ourselves against. A machine can mimic a voice, but it can’t live a life. It can’t carry the small, contradictory experiences that accumulate into character. When you already live in an era of relentless comparison, the last thing you want is to measure yourself against a bot.
Then there’s the part that feels even heavier: the environmental cost. We talk about AI as “the cloud,” as if our prompts float in something ethereal and weightless. In reality, every prompt is a tiny withdrawal from a physical system somewhere—a data center drawing megawatts of power and, increasingly, millions of gallons of water to keep servers cool. For a generation already carrying disproportionate climate anxiety, that’s a particular kind of irony. We feel personally affected by climate change and worried about environmental harm, yet we are tethered to one of the most resource-intensive efficiency tools ever created.
This is the contradiction I can’t shake: we are told that learning AI is non-negotiable for our careers, even as we try to live in alignment with our climate ethics. Surveys[1] show that many young people believe AI is necessary for school and work, but also fear it will erode their critical thinking skills and creativity. We are being conditioned to see AI literacy as a baseline professional skill, while privately wondering what it is doing to our minds, our jobs and our air.
As I prepare to graduate and move from intern to professional, I’ve realized that being the human in the loop is not enough of a promise. If you value my generation only for how quickly we can prompt, you’re investing in a diminishing return. Models will always get faster. My time at qb. has shown me that while AI can handle the logistical weeds of a workflow, it cannot supply the actual soul or strategy of a brand. The value of a new hire in 2026 is not just our speed; it is our taste, our ethics, our willingness to sit with ambiguity and resist the urge to auto-complete every hard thought.
So what would it look like to renegotiate this relationship more honestly? Maybe it starts with treating AI less like a replacement and more like a mirror. If a tool helps you generate a first draft, you still have to interrogate where your voice begins and ends. If AI helps you move faster, you have to decide when to slow back down and do the painful, original thinking yourself. Companies can help by setting clearer norms—not just about what is allowed, but about what they actually value in early career talent: curiosity over output, judgment over volume, integrity over speed.
And yet, even as I write this, I know what tomorrow will look like. I’ll open my iPad, feel the familiar pull of the deadline and I will almost certainly fall back into using the very tools I’m questioning. Not because I don’t care, but because the systems I’m entering reward acceleration above all else. That’s the trap my generation is caught in: we’re trying to stay human in a world that keeps asking us to move at machine pace. The work ahead isn’t to choose AI or reject it outright…it’s to decide, over and over again, which parts of ourselves are never up for outsourcing.
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by Chloe Wright-Haynie
Marketing Intern
