Not a single mind that woke up — but generations of individual human work, stacked one idea on the next. Walk the timeline and meet a few of the people.
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No single mind. No spark of consciousness. Just generations of individual human work — accumulated, and standing on one another's shoulders.
Holding all of that in mind — that it's mathematics and engineering, not a mind — I still talk to it like a colleague. Not because I'm fooled, but because it's a useful way to work: the framing invites me to explain myself, to push back, to collaborate. I even let myself get excited with it.
Once, I'd built and tested a method for spinning one source document into many products — decks, reports, one-page briefs. The first run came out beautifully, and I said so, with feeling:
A good colleague would say exactly that. I call it my AI colleague because the framing makes me a more careful collaborator — even while I hold the truth of this whole illustration in mind: it was built, not born.