AI’s future depends on becoming a digital assistant, not just party tricks

AI. It’s not the word of the year, but it was the force behind the word of the year.

“Slop” being chosen as Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is a real indictment of AI and where it’s found itself in the final month of 2025.

The next generation of tech has become synonymous with low-effort and low-quality content, and that’s hardly a good thing.

But it doesn’t have to be.

While a number of AI models seem dedicated to churning out slop and being far more unreliable search engines, there is a way forward for AI that doesn’t involve slop.

It just needs to go back to being a digital assistant.

AI is everywhere — whether you want it or not

To say that “AI is everywhere” has almost become an understatement.

Every morning, I expect to wake up and find out that AI has been incorporated into my toast. My dog? AI optimized. My underpants? AI-ready.

It’s getting harder and harder to avoid tripping over AI, even if you’re the sort of person who wants to avoid it.

But thousands and thousands of words have been spilled in discussion over the merits and ethics of AI, and I’m not here to dredge it back up again.

Instead, as someone who is, largely, anti-AI, I want to talk about where AI has, bizarrely, been working for me.

I am an AI outsider

I’m something of an AI outsider, and I’ve come to terms with that.

I’m skeptical about the future of AI and the financial basis it’s built on, so I’m wary of throwing too much of my life into a product I’m not 100% convinced will be around for a lot longer. Yeah, I’m talking about the bubble.

But there’s more to it than just that — to some extent, I just don’t get the appeal.

I don’t use ChatGPT as a search engine, because, well, I already have Google. I don’t need to make images of Pikachu running through a field of wheat, and I need the ability to make fake videos even less.

I have a Google AI Pro subscription through my Pixel 10 Pro purchase, but it has next to nothing I want.

But do you know what I have used? Magic Cue, Call Screen, and Call Recording.

Why these features in particular? They’re all helpful, useful features that mesh in with my life, and don’t expect me to go to them. Instead, they come to me.

In short, they’re digital assistants.

Putting the ‘assistant’ back into AI

Remember when AI chatbots were called digital assistants?

We stopped using that term some time around ChatGPT’s debut, and let’s be honest, it’s because calling them “AI” is far cooler.

Decades of science fiction promised us that AI is an all-powerful being, capable of running our lives and — in more notable cases — overthrowing humanity and living as a world-dominating tyrant.

It’s pure Rule of Cool stuff, and it doesn’t really line up with real life. Is our AI, as we have it now, really going to take over the world?

The stock market seems about all it can manage, with the vast majority of businesses not finding much profit from forcing AI into their workflow.

“Forcing” is the key there. There’s too much insistence on going to meet the AI where it is, and not having AI come to us.

Instead of an assistant, AI has become the hermit on the mountaintop.

Desperate for the forbidden knowledge of when to add PVA glue to pizza, we make the hazardous trek into parts unknown, only to realize we have to get back again if we actually want to use that knowledge, such as it is.

AI was better when it was a digital assistant, rather than an almighty prophet on high.

If AI is to become a central part of our lives, then it needs to become an assistant, rather than a hermit.

At least one company has managed to start doing this right, which means there’s a chance for everyone else.

Integrate AI, and stop the party tricks

I listed three features at the start of this piece, and they were Magic Cue, Call Screen, and Call Recording. They’re the three AI features I tend to use, and it’s no coincidence that they’re all from Google.

All three are excellently presented, and importantly, I don’t have to go looking to find them.

I call the vet, and Magic Cue finds my appointment details. Call Screen pops up every time I get an unknown number calling, and I can see whether it’s worth my time or not. Call Recording is there if I need it, every time I call someone.

All of this is only possible because of Google being able to integrate its Gemini AI into Android itself, so it’s unfair to hold this against independent AI creators like OpenAI, but I do think it’s where AI needs to go if it’s going to become a more successful product.

Would I pay for the ability to create silly images and videos? Absolutely not. Would I do so for a genuinely useful product like Call Screen? I actually might.

It’s time that AI grew up and moved past the party tricks of making images and videos. It’s time it went back to being a digital assistant and actually helped us.