I'd watched a video about ChatGPT before it was even available here, and the second it opened to the UK I signed up and dived in. My wife didn't have access yet, so she stood over my shoulder watching it fire back full answers, and we were both gobsmacked. I'll be honest — for a good while I genuinely felt like I was talking to a sentient being. I wasn't alone in that. Millions of people had the exact same gut reaction. That's how big the jump felt.
Before (roughly pre-2023)
Google meant a page of blue links — you clicked and read and pieced it together yourself. Homework and reports meant writing it, or lifting it off some dodgy site. Office work meant templates, macros, maybe a grammar checker that underlined things in green. "AI" to a normal person meant a voice assistant that misheard half your sentence, or a robot in a film.
AI was real, but it lived in research labs and niche tools. Most ordinary adults never once touched it.
After ChatGPT went public
"Just ask it" became a reflex — drafts, summaries, coding help, revision, a sounding board at 11pm. Schools and universities scrambled: is this cheating, or a calculator moment? Bosses started asking, "why are we paying for X when this thing's free?" Every big tech company declared a quiet emergency and shoved a chat product out the door.
And the real shift wasn't technical at all. It was social. Overnight, AI became something your nan had heard mentioned on the news.
Continue — why it felt so different under the hood.