Replace Yourself With a Human, Not Bot

Our Prompt: AI Replacements On May 28, 2026, Sixth Tone published a report by He Qitong titled He Quit Baidu. But First He Had to Build an AI Version of Himself. You can think of Baidu as China’s internal answer to Google, with “Google” meaning the broader suite of Google products and services, not only the search engine. The article is interesting and its “content” is well-represented by the headline. On first glance, one may think that I am about to offer my thoughts on the phenomenon of companies trying to replace employees with AI and related ethical and practical quandaries. One would be wrong in that assumption, however. Much like I did exactly one-month-and-a-half ago in April when I published AI Today, Calculators Back in the Day, I will use an article about today’s AI trends to share a story from my own high school days, well before the current AI moment. Just like large language models can turn human output into content, we can turn articles about AI into prompts for own own…