AI Is a Tool.
Are You One Too?

I'm Lao Liu, and I make games with AI. But here's what I found: learning AI doesn't actually ease the anxiety. Today it's a new model, tomorrow an agent, the day after another skill — and once you've learned it all, you still don't quite know what to do with it. For a long time I lived in that loop, constantly worried AI was moving so fast it would soon replace my work.

Eventually it dawned on me: the problem was never that we hadn't worked hard enough, or hadn't found good enough AI tools. It's that we never found a way to coexist with AI properly. AI is just a powerful tool. But the catch is — most of the time, we treat ourselves as tools too.

Think about it: ask someone to introduce themselves and they'll usually lead with a degree, a job title, a work history — how useful they are as a tool, rather than their ideas, interests, feelings, the things that make them human. Once we're used to objectifying our own identity into a tool, it's natural to fear and resent AI, a better tool. No one resents the tractor for making farming more efficient. But an ox would. And no ox, however well it learns to drive one, can avoid being replaced by it.

Of course, treating ourselves as tools was never our fault — the world has always demanded it. Growing up, our interests got called a distraction; expressing emotion got called instability; even a little curiosity about something we were told to study got shut down with "don't worry about that, just memorize it."

What the world selects for is a human calculator: feed in A, reliably and efficiently get out B. That conditioning worked so well that we ourselves came to believe this is simply what a person should be. But we can never fully live as pure tools — slowly, life starts to feel pointless, meaningless, and the midlife crisis sets in. And finding your way back to yourself is brutally hard, because it means going up against the world — against what Lacan called the Big Other, the voice inside your head that speaks for the world.

I was a textbook bad student — couldn't sit still for an hour of homework, but could sit all day sketching game designs on scratch paper. I loved computers as a kid: I'd finished a web-design suite by middle school and passed a certified-designer exam in high school. Then, applying to college, one line from my parents — "you're terrible at math, why study computer science" — talked me out of it. I majored in architecture.

From 2010 to 2015, the internet's fastest-growing years, I spent none of that time on the thing I was actually good at, and poured everything into the thing I'd never been good at but was "supposed" to do — qualifying as a licensed architect. It came to nothing. To land a state-owned-enterprise job, I gave up even the design work I still cared about and went into consulting. Looking back, none of those decisions were forced on me — each felt, at the time, like the most reasonable choice. But they carried me further and further from myself, until I was living like a shell of a person. I only want to say sorry to who I used to be — sorry I took someone who tried that hard and turned him into this.

I first touched a game engine in 2017, but for four years I used it for architectural visualization, BIM, exhibition halls, even a HoloLens app — everything I could think of, except making a game. Because the Big Other in my head kept telling me games were a waste of a life, not real work. So I circled the door marked "become who you actually are" for years.

Even at the end, I didn't come to it on my own. I got laid off in my mid-30s and watched my whole industry start to collapse, with nowhere to go. Only then did the Big Other finally say: fine, I'll let you go — you're no longer useful anyway. And only then did it hit me — once nothing works anymore, anything becomes possible. In that exact moment, the three words that should have surfaced years earlier finally did: make games.

Most of us are powerless before the Big Other — often without realizing it. It usually takes something like a midlife layoff, an existential crisis, to force the question: if the world no longer needs me, who am I, and what should I do? AI's arrival hands that same crisis to all of us, equally, at once.

I don't think AI will destroy humanity. But it lands a serious blow on our very definition of being human, forcing us to look for value beyond mental labor. Almost no one truly wants to hide their personality, interests, emotions, thoughts — the parts that make us subjects rather than tools; we just were never allowed to show them. The most valuable thing in the world has always been the human part. But "being human," fully, has always been a privilege of the very few — the rest of us were only allowed to be tools amplifying their humanity.

That's exactly what AI means: it makes being human a right, not a privilege. It lets a directing student put out finished work an audience can see; it lets a painter write the code to turn their paintings into a game. Once we're no longer one link in someone else's production line — once AI can complete the rest of that line for us — we can reach other people directly, in whatever form we choose, and we get back the right to express ourselves, to be human. That's the point where AI stops being our enemy and becomes our most reliable partner.

That's exactly what AI means: it makes being human a right, not a privilege.