Welcome back to the AI For Humans newsletter!

Quick heads up before we get going: there's no ad this week. Instead, I'm using that space to ask you something (more on that in a sec), because this is one of those issues where I really want to know if I'm on the right track.

This week, two things I read about keep popping up in my brain.

One: another major literary prize got tangled up in AI.

Several winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (stories published in Granta, no less) are now very likely AI-generated according to detection analysis.

Two: My favorite OpenAI employee and genuine weirdo, Roon, started posting about how we should all be preparing ourselves for the AI takeoff.

A machine quietly winning a fiction prize, and one of the people building these things telling us to stop pretending this is normal.

Welcome to 2026.

Put those two together and I keep circling one question::

What should YOU actually do to prepare for what's coming? And maybe more importantly, how do you guide your kids through it?

This one's broad and a little heavy, so bear with me. Let's get into it.

Quick background, because Roon's line only lands if you know the reference.

"Mind Children" comes from a 1988 book by roboticist Hans Moravec.

His argument, way ahead of its time, was basically this: the machines we build that can think are not really tools in the way a hammer is a tool. They're more like our descendants, the next thing carrying human knowledge and culture forward the way kids carry their parents forward.

Roon's point is that calling that a "b2b productivity tool" is a little like calling a newborn a "small loud roommate." While it might be technically accurate, it misses the plot.

You don't have to fully buy the sci-fi version to feel the weight of it. The people closest to this stuff have stopped treating "AI gets dramatically smarter than us" as a fringe idea.

So let's just take them seriously for a second and ask what that means for regular humans like us with mortgages and kids and careers.

I'm going to be frank: pretty much everything is on the table right now.

Yes, it'll take time to diffuse through society. Yes, there will be speedbumps, walkbacks, and weird Friday-night government letters (ask Fable 5 how that went).

But if we assume the people saying these systems keep getting smarter are even roughly right, and the literary-prize thing is a tiny preview, then here's the uncomfortable part:

A lot of us built our entire sense of self on being good at a thing. On the twenty years we put in to become the person in the room who knows how to do something.

And the hard truth is, all those years of hard-won expertise in a field… who cares.

The machines are learning it overnight, and it'll do it for a fraction of the cost. That's just the trajectory pointed at its logical end.

But here's what I actually believe: the thing that's collapsing isn't your worth.

What's collapsing is a story we got handed about where worth comes from.

Ask someone who they are at a party and they tell you their job. AI is about to quietly detonate that definition.

And, more importantly, that definition was always a little bit of a trap.

So the real work coming is bigger than career strategy. It's about resetting where we find meaning: untangling "what I produce" from "who I am."

That sounds soft and philosophical until you realize it's about to become the single most practical skill of the next decade.

Here's where I get optimistic, and I promise I’m not faking it.

Humans are weird.

Our so-called liabilities (we're fragile, we're emotional, we get bored, we want things we can't explain) are exactly what make us interesting. We eat the second bowl of ice cream (terrible). We regret it (still terrible). And somehow that regret kicks off a Monday-morning resolution to finally get our act together and go for a run (an actual triumph).

Would an AI ever do that? Of course not. Why would it? It's a deeply inefficient, slightly miserable little loop. We don't even decide to do it. We just do.

But that messy, irrational loop is the engine of something machines fundamentally don't have: novelty.

We're constantly making strange choices, bumping into unique situations, and stumbling onto ideas nobody asked for. That's where art and science and the occasional great joke actually come from. Not from polishing what we already know, but from blundering into what we don't.

A model trained on everything humans have already made is, by definition, a map of the past. It's incredible at the past. You, irrational and distractible and occasionally ice-cream-poisoned, are one of the only things on earth reliably generating the actually new.

Eventually the machines might figure this out too, but I think we've got a long head-start.

There is a catch, and it's a big one: novelty only counts if you're producing, not just consuming.

It's never been easier to spend your whole day just taking stuff in, letting other people's (and now machines') ideas wash over you. That's the trap. The people who thrive in the weird future won't be the ones who consumed the most AI output.

They’ll be the ones suffering through the hard part of actually ‘doing’ when the doing isn’t really that easy.

Did I mention I hate writing? But, good lord, I somehow still do it.

This is the hard part. I've got kids, and a lot of you do too.

The instinct is to ask, "what should they study so they have a job in twenty years?" And I think that's the wrong question, partly because I don't know the answer, and partly because anyone who tells you they do is selling something.

So, here's what I keep coming back to:

If the old advice was specialize and get great at one valuable thing, the new advice might be closer to the opposite: raise kids who are adaptable, curious, and comfortable being beginners over and over again.

A few things I suggest (with no certainty I'm right):

That last one isn't a strategy. It's just… how to raise a person. Which, the more I sit with this whole topic, might be the actual point.

There is a way to stave off the existential crisis in yourself and you can do it right now.

Take a five minute break from whatever you’re doing and let yourself get bored. Set a timer on your phone and let yourself just daydream something.

Put the idea into your notes app and then come back later when you have a few hours.

Then, take that idea and make something new with an AI tool, where you bring the strange idea and the tool just helps you build it faster. A song, a tiny app, a weird short story, whatever. Notice how different that feels from scrolling. That muscle, human idea plus machine execution, is the one I'd bet on.

Look, I stepped into a much bigger subject than a newsletter can really hold this week, and I'm not sure I nailed it.

Which is exactly why I'd love for you to take that survey and tell me whether this kind of thing (the bigger, weirder, more personal stuff) is what you actually want from me, or whether you'd rather I stick to the news and the tools. No wrong answer. I just want to make this thing actually for you.

-Gavin

This week on AI For Humans, the Fable 5 Lock Down 👇

So much AI video is fun but forgettable. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

But when somebody makes something that lasts, it deserves a spotlight.

Robert Gaudette's "A Face Only A Mother Could Love" just won the $50,000 Grand Prix at Runway's AI Film Festival, and it's worth ten minutes of your day. It's an eight-minute short about Marcel, a Parisian man with a facial disfigurement who dances alone in his apartment every night, hopefully waiting for a companion who never comes. It's surprisingly tender, maybe the most human movie AI has produced yet.

The kicker that ties right back to today's main story: Gaudette is a 54-year-old former nonprofit worker from Toronto with no film school, no crew, and no actors. Just a strong, specific human point of view, and a stack of AI tools to execute it.

The Hollywood Reporter did a great feature on him. Go read it, then go follow him.