The AI identity crisis hit Scrabble players a decade ago

I read that engineers are feeling it now. In my world, we've been watching bots dismantle tournament fields since 2014. The real grief isn't the loss—it's realizing the thing you loved doing was, from one angle, just a very clever pattern-matching algorithm. But we keep playing because the human texture—the table talk, the nerve, the small talk—that's not replicable.