April 2025 — Engagement

A Year in Review: When Curiosity Met Power

April was the month when questions stopped feeling theoretical.

March taught me how to ask better questions. April showed me what those questions uncover—and why answers carry weight.

The month began by finishing a series on artificial intelligence. Much of the feedback centered on fear: Would AI replace creativity? Would originality disappear? Would everything begin to look and sound the same?

The answer turned out to depend on what we mean by creative.

People value uniqueness. We’re drawn to novelty, even when we pretend otherwise. Formula-driven books sell—until something genuinely new appears and reshapes the landscape. Music, fashion, and art all follow this pattern. Every generation insists on its own style, only to cringe decades later when old photos resurface.

That discomfort is the point.

We don’t just want content. We want originality. We want to recognize something new when it arrives. AI can generate content—but originality, at least for now, still carries a human fingerprint.

That doesn’t make AI a threat to creativity. It makes it a tool. Like calculators and computers before it, AI removes friction. It speeds up process. It frees time for judgment, synthesis, and intent. We already live with this contradiction: we can manufacture perfect diamonds, yet still value the ones pulled from the earth. We shop on Amazon, yet Etsy thrives. Efficiency hasn’t erased our appetite for the human touch.

At the same time, April deepened another line of inquiry: information itself.

How bias forms. How misinformation spreads. And what happens when falsehoods are repeated faster than they can be corrected.

That curiosity led to two tools. The first was an AI Bias Monitor, comparing how different language models evaluated the same news stories week after week. What emerged wasn’t a single bias, but movement. Scores shifted as models updated. Narratives changed when certain stories dominated the news cycle. AI, like media, reflects the information it consumes—and sometimes bias isn’t about what’s said, but what’s left out.

The second tool was a Misinformation Analyzer—designed to evaluate public figures and organizations based on what they’ve said over time. Not ideology. Outcomes. Claims made. Claims corrected—or not. Reach mattered. Origination mattered. And one insight stood out clearly: AI remembers. Stories don’t disappear when the news cycle moves on. History accumulates.

That realization pushed April into more uncomfortable territory.

Questions about power followed naturally. About political parties. About whether they still resembled what many of us grew up with—or whether something else had taken center stage.

The Republican Party’s shift toward treating government like a business raised questions about sustainability. Short-term wins don’t replace long-term stewardship. When economic power drains from the public, demand collapses—and eventually, even corporations run out of customers.

The Democratic Party’s shift away from economic focus toward cultural enforcement raised different concerns. Equality without persuasion produces backlash. Engagement turns into resistance when people feel targeted rather than included.

Between them sat a third force that became impossible to ignore: Corporate America. Not ideological. Transactional. Aligned with whichever structure maximized profit and minimized accountability. The evidence was everywhere—from healthcare pricing to consolidation, from advertising scams to the erosion of small business.

Immigration exposed the same pattern. The rhetoric was emotional. The reality was economic. Undocumented workers contribute labor, pay taxes, and fund systems they often can’t access. The problem wasn’t contribution—it was ambiguity. A system that benefits from confusion stays confused by design.

By the end of April, one thing was clear.

Curiosity alone wasn’t enough anymore.

Engagement meant confronting systems that reward distortion, concentrate power, and thrive on emotional shortcuts. April didn’t offer comfort.

It offered clarity.

And clarity has a cost.