From: Prompt Guy <promptguy1@substack.com> To: massoumi.cyrus@gmail.com Reply to: Prompt Guy <reply+3l1xu7&k1yi2&&57be4d8c8dec3d39ac74077ed536c44b29da3270094be1f551091547f0779707@mg1.substack.com> Subject: Is AI Just a Trend? Sent: Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:16:13 +0000 Sent (UTC): 2026-09-21T16:16:13.000Z Sent (America/Los_Angeles): 2026-09-21T09:16:13.000-07:00 Account: 62ca724fdabf40deba435e42eb88ef18 Gmail message: 1a0c4c2c7ec37161 Thread: 1a0c4c2c7ec37161 Message-ID: 20260921161613.3.2635e2e4fc1f6009@mg2.substack.com References: post-216760975@substack.com Body coverage: full Body format: markdown
Reading Time: 9 minutes Hey Prompt Lover I wasn’t planning to send anything today. I’ve been moody lately, the kind of moody where you’ve read too much, heard too much, and none of it’s settled into anything clean enough to write about properly. But I’ve been sitting with one question for days now and I want to just think through it out loud with you instead of waiting until I’ve got it all figured out. Is AI actually a trend that stays, or is it something we’re going to look back on the way we look back on 3D TV.
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#### Let me start with the video, because it’s what triggered this whole thing for me A while back Elon posted an AI generated video on X called “Welcome to Mars.” One minute, twelve seconds. A shimmering Martian city, sleek ships hovering over towers, Earth glowing somewhere in the sky behind it all. It picked up over 46 million views. And almost immediately, the replies filled with the same three words. Fix Earth first. I keep coming back to that video, not because of Mars, but because of what it actually was. A completely AI generated vision of a future that doesn’t exist, presented with total confidence, watched by tens of millions of people, and changing nothing about anyone’s actual life the next morning. It was spectacle. Beautiful, viral, forgettable spectacle. And I couldn’t stop asking myself, is that what a lot of AI actually is right now. A very convincing video of a future that never quite arrives. #### Here’s the uncomfortable data point that made me take the question seriously Gartner’s own 2026 Hype Cycle just placed generative AI firmly in what they call the Trough of Disillusionment. That’s the specific phase where the original excitement wears off and the numbers start telling a less flattering story. And the numbers here are rough. The average company spent 1.9 million dollars on generative AI initiatives, and less than 30 percent of CEOs say they’re actually happy with the return on that money. Agentic AI, the more advanced stuff, agents that actually take action instead of just answering questions, is even earlier in the cycle. Only 17 percent of organizations have actually deployed AI agents in production right now. Gartner itself predicts agents are heading into their own trough sometime this year, the same disappointment phase generative AI just went through. That’s a real, measured gap between how AI gets talked about and what it’s actually delivering for most of the people paying for it. #### But here’s where I have to be honest with myself, because this isn’t the whole story Every single technology that ever became permanently part of our lives went through this exact same trough. That’s not me being generous to AI. That’s literally how the Gartner model works, and it’s not new. The internet went through a version of this. So did cloud computing. So did smartphones, back when people genuinely debated whether anyone needed the internet in their pocket. The trough isn’t a death sentence. Gartner’s own framing is that it’s where a technology stops being about “what it could theoretically do” and starts being about “what it actually does for real work.” The companies that push through it are usually the ones that end up owning the next decade. So the trough alone doesn’t tell me anything. Plenty of things have died in that exact spot too.
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#### Here’s what actually died, and I think the pattern is the important part 3D TV never made it out. Every major manufacturer bet on it after Avatar in 2009. By 2017 it was gone, quietly discontinued, no announcement, no funeral. The reason, when I actually looked into it, wasn’t that the technology failed. The picture genuinely looked impressive. It failed because it added friction to something people already enjoyed doing easily. Nobody wanted to put on glasses to watch television. Google Glass died even faster. Launched 2013, discontinued as a consumer product by 2015. Fifteen hundred dollars, genuinely ambitious, and it died because of the exact same pattern, friction where there used to be ease, plus a real privacy backlash that gave the whole thing a nickname, Glasshole, that outlived the product itself. The Metaverse might be the most expensive failure on this list. Meta poured tens of billions into it, took a 13.7 billion dollar loss in a single year, and headsets ended up gathering dust in closets while the company quietly pivoted its entire strategy toward AI instead. NFTs went through the exact same arc even faster, a genuine mania in 2021, celebrities buying cartoon apes, and within two years most of the marketplaces had simply closed. Look at all four of those side by side and the pattern is identical every time. Excitement outran actual usefulness. The thing added a step nobody asked for, or solved a problem nobody actually had, and the moment the novelty wore off, there was nothing underneath holding people there. #### So here’s the actual question I keep sitting with Is AI more like the internet, genuinely useful the moment the hype settles, something that quietly rearranges how work gets done regardless of whether anyone’s excited about it anymore. Or is it more like the Metaverse, a genuinely expensive, genuinely impressive demo that never closes the gap between the video and the actual Tuesday morning it promised to change. I don’t think the honest answer is fully either one yet, and I think that’s exactly why I’ve been moody about this. Some of AI clearly already crossed over. I use it every single day for actual work that gets actually finished. That part isn’t hype anymore, it’s just how I work now, the same quiet way the internet became just how everyone works now. But some of what gets sold as AI right now feels a lot closer to that Mars video. Impressive. Viral. Confidently presented. And genuinely unclear whether it changes anything real once the views stop counting. I think the honest test, the one I’m going to start actually applying instead of just nodding along to demos, is the same one that killed 3D TV and Google Glass. Does this remove a step from something I already do, or does it add one while promising the payoff later. The stuff that removes friction is the stuff that survives the trough. The stuff that just looks impressive in a video usually doesn’t. I don’t have a clean ending for this one today. I genuinely don’t know yet which version of AI most of what we’re using right now actually is. I just know I’d rather ask the question honestly than keep nodding along to another beautiful video of a city on Mars. Reply and tell me honestly, where do you land on this. Does the AI you’re actually using feel like the internet did once the hype wore off, or does some of it feel closer to that Mars video, impressive, and not actually changing your Tuesday yet? The Prompt Guyp.s reply to this newsletter to sponsor our next newsletter
