AI for Work. Humans for Art.

A few friends have started throwing (good-natured) shade at me for how often I talk about generative AI as a productivity weapon. I mention my custom AI stack the way some people yammer on about their fantasy football teams, probably too often, too enthusiastically, and with the assumption that anyone cares. The internet is saturated with AI hype, and the loudest evangelists tend to be the least discerning. They talk as if LLMs can replace judgment, taste, talent, and even personality. They post like they have found a shortcut around life. That vibe deserves all the ridicule it gets.

It also misses what’s actually happening for people who use these systems the way serious knowledge workers find advantage in any emerging smart tool. Over the past year, I’ve built and refined a tight suite of customized AI apps that has upgraded the way I work. They’ve taken over my bookmarks bar, and each one is tuned to a specific kind of work: the documents I live in, my research methods, the way I learn, and the way I interrogate datasets so I can make better decisions. For the cost, the payoff is absurd, and I can often do in a day what used to take a week. I’m not bragging. I’m making a point. Once you get past party tricks like “write an email to my kid’s teacher” or “turn me into an action figure,” and commit to building a set of tools with deep customization, there is transformative capability sitting within reach.

That is the part of the generative AI story I’m selling. It’s also where I stop. That’s where my pitch ends. Go much beyond that line and the story moves quickly from reality and aspiration to fantasy. The clearest example, and what’s gotten my attention lately, is the growing narrative that recent advances in generative models have AI coming for the creatives and the arts.

There’s a category error at the heart of a lot of AI discourse. People tend to treat “generative” as one thing, as if the same tool that compresses admin work and efficiently crunches data is also destined to produce the next Pet Sounds or the next Blood Meridian. It won’t. Not for discerning audiences. Not because the models won’t get better. They will. Not because the output won’t become more convincing. It will. The deeper issue is that great art is not the average of what came before. Great art is the exception. It is the weird, the imperfect, the non-conforming, the sharply personal thing that refuses the consensus. Models thrive on convergence. They reward patterns. They smooth edges. That orientation runs directly counter to the qualities that make the best art penetrate the soul.

Expose yourself to enough AI-generated creative and you start to feel it in your head. It’s not anger so much as fatigue. It’s the same sensation you get after scrolling past a hundred identical stock photos or reading a string of banal corporate blog posts. Your brain recognizes that nothing is at stake. No risk. No voice. No lived tension. No substance. Just output. Plenty of it. “Competent” becomes the ceiling, and competent is a dead end for art. I’ve said before that we’re already flooding the world with AI-generated junk in writing, and it’s becoming true across many formats.

My stance is straightforward. AI is phenomenal for personal productivity and, in many professional contexts, a clear net positive. AI is mediocre at best for creative work, and the more it spreads, the more it will cheapen the middle of the market. That cheapening will not displace our best creatives. It will spotlight them.

Email didn’t improve the quality of human communication; it increased the volume. The internet didn’t eliminate bad writing; it gave it a printing press. Generative AI is following that lineage.

I’ve seen the latest AI-generated art, read the fiction, listened to the music, and watched the video clips. Some of it is cute. Some of it is impressive in the way a good magic trick is impressive. None of it makes me feel what real art makes me feel. The output lands in the middle: technically acceptable, emotionally vacant, instantly forgettable. There’s a reason even the defenders of AI art keep describing it as “good enough.” “Good enough” is not a standard anyone uses for books they keep, albums they return to, or films that change how they see the world.

So, what happens next? Two things, and they pull in opposite directions.

First, there will be an increasing flood of synthetic content that turns whole slices of the market into a commodity. If you’ve been making a comfortable living selling formulaic sludge—interchangeable romance plots, recycled thriller structures, SEO-chasing non-fiction, “10 habits of highly effective fuckery”—you should be nervous. Your advantage was never vision or brilliance; it was volume and distribution. That game is now hyper automated. The middle will collapse under its own weight, because the middle is exactly what these systems reproduce best.

Second, the top end gets more valuable. People who can write, compose, paint, direct, and actually think in original shapes (across all industries and modalities) will stand out even more than they do today. The glut will create contrast. The audience that cares will pay attention, the way you notice the quality of a good vinyl pressing after hearing too much compressed audio. The very presence of cheap, infinite “content” will restore scarcity to the things that feel human: taste, point of view, surprise, craft.

My friends think I’m an AI booster. They’re half right. I’m a booster for any tool that enables a capable person to do more quality work with less wasted motion. I’m not interested in replacing my designer with prompted outputs or replacing musicians and writers with AI slop for volume and price. That’s not progress. That’s a race to Pleasantville. I built my stack to buy back time and attention, and I’m spending that reclaimed time the same way I always wanted to: on thinking, on choosing, on shaping, and on appreciating the parts of work and art that require a brain and a spine.

If this email was forwarded to you and you’d like it delivered directly to your inbox each day, subscribe below.