Has AI killed our capacity for amazement?

How AI changes what dazzles us—and why that matters for creativity and wellbeing.

A woman with a debilitating illness declines a life-transforming, risky surgery that could restore her health…until a brilliant autistic doctor identifies an alternate surgical approach with all the benefits, but none of the risks. This plotline from The Good Doctor typifies how TV often fetishizes the talents of neurodivergent people—and it's just the sort of plotline that looks even more ridiculous in the age of AI.

As I argue in my latest for The Wall Street Journal, The Popular TV Plots That Won't Make Sense in an AI World , “many of our most familiar plotlines are about to look as dated as an ad exec with a flip phone.” The 11th hour diagnosis, the lawyer who saves the day by discovering an obscure precedent, the painstakingly plotted heist: None of them makes sense in a world where you can ask an AI to review every medical file, legal precedent or casino-security gap.

It's not only fictional doctors and lawyers who are hard-pressed to deliver jaw-dropping miracles. It's tougher to impress colleagues or clients when adequate-to-exceptional work is just a few keyboard clicks away. The more we're dazzled by AI, the harder it is to be bowled over by old-fashioned human creativity.

Speed from emerald to jaded.

Just a few days ago, I went to see what should have felt like an eye-popping movie—Wicked—but my eyes remained firmly in their sockets. Once upon a time I’d have been thrilled by the imaginative clockwork gears of the Emerald City train, for example, but I've now seen so many computer-generated starships that a bright green locomotive barely registered.

The Emerald City train in Wicked