I noticed recently that I kept hearing myself say the words 'I feel so conflicted'.
It's a sentiment that's been popping up about different things in my life. An obvious, and likely familiar one: I want to be present for this fleeting season of motherhood, but I also want to continue to build a strong financial future for my family. Conflicted.
Time away from the day-to-day of my business has me reevaluating; I don’t particularly want to spend my life online, but I run a business where being visible matters. Conflicted.
And then there’s AI. Conflicted.
I have a list of reasons I don’t really want to be part of a future that relies heavily on artificial intelligence. I worry about what it means for creativity and critical thinking, for the value we place on human craft, and for our ability to sit with a problem long enough to come up with something genuinely original.
I feel gross and concerned about the environmental impact.
I have genuine fears (and if you've done your research, they are genuine, so don't you be rolling yer eyes at me!) about what it means for humanity. With the emergence of general intelligence (AGI), you should know it's not just jobs like mine that are changing.
(My partner does remind me that if we do this right, we could be heading towards utopia. No jobs; everyone just doing what they love, for the love of it!)
At the same time, I'm no luddite. I've worked in, and with, the tech sector for a massive chunk of my career. I know AI isn’t going anywhere. And in being pragmatic about my business, burying my head in the sand and refusing to engage with it is not sensible.
And really, it's not like there's a choice. Well, there is a choice, and it's basically choose to use and understand AI and have a job, or choose to avoid it, and be unemployable.
So, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work out where I stand. Am I pro-AI or anti-AI? Do I use it or don’t I? Can I embrace what’s coming while still wanting to protect some of what came before?
Maybe I've been focused on finding a binary stance because our cancel-culture world doesn't like a grey area. No one has time for nuance while on a quick scroll. I keep waiting for someone to shout 'Hypocrite!' if I promote an AI offering.
Except I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve been trying to solve something that doesn’t actually need solving.
Because two things can be true, right? There’s a concept called dialectical thinking: the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas and recognise that both can contain truth. Rather than either/or, it allows for both/and.
I can want to build an ambitious business and want to be a present mum. I can recognise the value of visibility and want a life that happens mostly offline. And perhaps I can believe AI is an extraordinary piece of technology that will fundamentally change how we work while also feeling deeply uncomfortable about some of what we might lose in exchange.
Maybe those positions don’t need to be reconciled into one neat, black-n-white opinion. Maybe the tension itself is the whole point.
Because discomfort makes us ask questions.
It makes us notice what we’re doing rather than simply adopting whatever becomes normal or trendy or easy. If I decide AI is unequivocally good and embrace every convenience it offers, I risk no longer questioning what I’m handing over. If I reject it entirely, I close myself off to what it might genuinely make better.
Perhaps sitting somewhere in between forces me to be more deliberate. Instead of asking simply can AI do this?, I find myself asking: Could I do this myself? Should I do this myself? And what happens to me if I stop doing this myself?
What happens if we stop doing it ourselves?
I don’t think the biggest risk is that AI will produce mediocre creative work. I think it’s that we gradually stop exercising the parts of ourselves required to produce original thought.
If every question gets answered immediately, every blank page gets filled, every half-formed thought gets completed and every moment of boredom gets interrupted, we remove many of the conditions creativity has always relied on.
And unlike the arrival of calculators, this isn’t simply about outsourcing a task. Thinking is the task.
For those of us whose work depends on ideas, perspective, judgement, curiosity and making connections other people haven’t made yet, that distinction matters. We can talk about AI as a tool that helps us think, and I believe it can be. But I also think we need to be honest about the possibility that the more readily we reach for it, the less opportunity we give ourselves to think without it.
That worries me more than whether AI can write a decent headline.
Some things are valuable precisely because they’re inefficient
AI promises to make an enormous number of things easier, and plenty of them should be. There are tasks I will gladly hand over without feeling sad for the loss of human endeavour.
But creativity is different. So much of what makes us interesting thinkers happens in the parts of the process we’re increasingly being encouraged to skip: sitting with an idea that isn’t fully formed yet, writing the bad first paragraph, getting stuck, going for a walk, reading something completely unrelated and suddenly seeing a connection, or having a conversation that sends your thinking sideways.
The other day I was working on piece of copy and, on getting stuck, I did things the old fashioned way: I had a shower. And, as predicted, I had a creative download that I never could have achieved in conversation with a bot, because the thinking hadn't happened yet.
Even boredom has a role to play. These things are inefficient as hell, but they’re also often where the good stuff comes from.
The blank page is uncomfortable, which is exactly why handing it to AI is so tempting. Within seconds, it can give you 20 ideas, 10 angles and a perfectly serviceable opening paragraph. But I’m increasingly interested in what happens before we ask it. What might have appeared if we’d stayed uncomfortable for another ten minutes?
It's that space between not knowing and knowing that I’m reluctant to optimise away.
I don’t want to outsource the wrong things
This is where I think my relationship with AI is starting to take shape, through being much more deliberate about what I’m willing to outsource, and then being really intentional about how it's done (using the right tools, prompts and processes).
I don’t necessarily need to spend my time on the administrative grunt work. I don’t need to prove anything by doing manually what technology can sensibly do for me. But I do want to protect the parts of my work that require me to form an opinion, notice something, make an unexpected connection or develop an idea that wasn’t sitting glaringly in front of me to begin with.
So perhaps one of my boundaries is simple: I want to know what I think before I ask a machine what it thinks.
I want to have the idea and wrestle with it first. I want to follow the strange little thread my brain has noticed and see where it leads before asking AI to pull on it for me. Then, maybe, I can invite the machine in.
I'm wary of anyone else who is 'all in' without having their own hesitations. I know that real experts are usually wise enough to not call themselves experts.
That doesn’t give me a tidy policy for AI use. There will inevitably be grey areas, and I suspect the line will keep moving as the technology does. But perhaps that’s exactly why I don’t want to become too comfortable with it.
Not everything that can be made easier should be
We’ve become very good at treating friction as a problem to eliminate: faster, easier, automated, optimised. And in many areas of life, brilliant. Please automate away.
But I think there are forms of friction worth protecting. The difficulty of finding the words. The boredom before the idea. The research rabbit hole. The conversation you couldn’t have predicted. The first attempt that doesn’t work. The time it takes for disparate things you’ve seen, read and experienced to bump into each other and become something new.
If we optimise all of that away, I wonder what else disappears with it.
I don’t know exactly what our relationship with AI should look like in two or ten years, and I’m wary of anyone who claims they do. What I do know is that I don’t want convenience to become the only measure by which I decide whether a technology deserves a place in my life or my creative process. I won't tell you to avoid it, but I will share ways for you to use it more intentionally.
So, for now, I’m just sitting in the tension. I'm no longer particularly interested in resolving my conflict about AI, but I'll continue to pay attention to it. I want the discomfort to keep making me question what I’m doing, notice what I’m handing over and decide, consciously, what I value enough to keep doing the slow way.
