There’s a shift happening. You can feel it.
New tools. New shortcuts. Whole workflows rearranging themselves. I don’t find that especially scary. It feels more like when the internet arrived. You could refuse it, but all that really meant was making your own life harder.
I’ve used AI. I’ll keep using it.
But here’s the bit that matters to me. A tool can extend your hands. It can’t give you a point of view.
A prompt can produce an output. It can’t decide what’s worth saying. Access isn’t the same thing as taste.
There’s this idea that because these tools are becoming more powerful, everyone is now a designer. Or a writer. Or a musician. Maybe at a surface level, that’s true. But we’ve been here before. Digital cameras didn’t make everyone a photographer. GarageBand didn’t turn everyone into a producer. They just made it easier to make something.
What separates the work that stays with you from the work you scroll past has never been access. It’s judgement. It’s sensitivity. It’s knowing when something is technically fine but emotionally flat. That part is still human.
I feel this most strongly with music. When I write a song, I’m not assembling parts. I’m working with something personal. Sometimes uncomfortable. Something I don’t fully understand yet. There’s a vulnerability in that process that I don’t want to hand over to a system built to predict patterns.
Design is slightly different. It’s always had one foot in logic. I don’t mind a tool helping me organise, speed up, or test directions. But I still want to be the one deciding what the thing means. Because design without intention is just arrangement.
What I do worry about is the flattening. Tools training on tools. References recycling themselves. Work that is technically polished but feels oddly interchangeable. A lot of things might start to look “good” in the same way. That’s where taste matters even more. Not taste as status. Taste as attention. As the ability to notice when something feels alive versus when it’s just competent.
These days, being a creative person feels less like being a maker and more like being a filter. You choose what to keep. What to discard. Where to go deeper. Where to stop. Otherwise the tools will keep producing, and the noise just gets louder.
So yes, I’ll use AI. But I’m not handing over the interesting part. The part that connects things that don’t obviously belong together. The part that sits with ambiguity. The part that senses when something is technically right but emotionally wrong.
That’s still the work. And that’s the bit I care about. Because the magic was never in the tool. It was in the way someone chose to use it.