I went to South Summit this year (2026). At least 80% of all panels talked about something + AI. So I decided to put down some ideas, not about AI itself, but about how people are reacting to it.
And I'm not talking about what I saw at the Summit. At the Summit I saw awesome speakers and real insights. I'm talking about what I see every day on the internet, on LinkedIn, in every comment section where AI comes up.
Let's split people into three categories, just to make this easier. Think of them less as boxes and more as shades on a spectrum.
- The deniers
- The enthusiasts
- The skeptics
I'll be direct.
The deniers' bubble
The deniers hold their position as a pose. It's the same energy as using Vim to code, or insisting that riding a horse is more "authentic" than taking a plane. The tool changes, the destination is the same. But that's not the point for them. The point is the identity they build around rejecting the new thing.
You don't really see them at the Summit. They're mostly on the internet. But I think the louder the hype gets, the harder they push back. The enthusiasts are feeding them.
The enthusiasts' bubble
The enthusiasts believe in some AI-guided paradise where every human problem gets solved by prompting something like "cure cancer, please." They see the technology and project onto it everything they wish the world would do: skip all the complexity, all the constraints, all the years of accumulated knowledge.
This does a lot of damage in the market. Promises get made. Products get pitched. Investors put the money. And then reality arrives, and the promises don't happen. Not because the technology is worthless, but because it was never capable of what was claimed for it. People who believed the enthusiasts feel burned. Some of them become deniers.
The skeptics' bubble
The skeptics already understand how AI works. They've used it seriously, not as a party trick. They know where it helps and where it fails. They build workflows around it. They talk about the actual thing, not the imagined thing.
The problem is they're too quiet.
The internet is full of bot-like AI content: generated summaries, hot takes, promise-heavy threads. The skeptics are out there, but they're not flooding the zone the way the enthusiasts are. That needs to change.
I believe the skeptics need to start building and writing more publicly. Tools that empower people, not substitute them. Articles that describe the actual experience of using AI, not the imagined one.
What I think we get wrong
There's a pattern I keep noticing: both the deniers and the enthusiasts are reacting to the same fiction: the idea that AI will replace humans in human fields.
The denier says "it never will" and uses that as a reason to avoid engaging.
The enthusiast says "it absolutely will" and uses that as a reason to invest and promise.
Both are orienting around a thing that isn't happening. AI is a tool. A genuinely useful, genuinely limited tool. It changes what some work looks like. It doesn't change what the work is for.
The greatest damage AI could cause is not that it replaces anyone. It's that people start to believe it will, and either disengage from it entirely, or invest so deeply in that belief that they stop doing the hard, human parts of their work.
To wrap up
I left South Summit more convinced that the problem isn't the technology. The problem is the conversation we're having about it.
The deniers need to separate their identity from their toolchain. The enthusiasts need to be honest about what exists today, not what only exists in pitch decks. And the skeptics (the people who actually understand this stuff) need to be louder.
Not to fight the hype. But silence is also a choice, and someone will fill that space.
If this came across as a rant, maybe it was. But I think it comes from the right place. We're all figuring this out.