Scroll for more than a few swipes and you land in the middle of a mess. One side tells you if you are not AI ready, you are out. The other side claims they can spot a ChatGPT-written post a mile off. If you use AI, your work is shit. Everyone is shouting. Few are making sense. It’s as baseless as UX vs the world.
Job descriptions now expect you to be an AI expert in your field. As if that means anything. AI has not been around long enough for anyone to truly become one. At best, there are early adopters, power users, and curious creatives. While the rest of us are dipping in and out, most of the noise is either panic or performance. Some posts are crying out to protect the craft. Others are blindly embracing whatever feels new. In the middle, there are a lot of people just trying to keep the lights on.
Let’s be clear. You are not an expert. Neither am I. Maybe you are ahead of the curve. Maybe you use AI tools more than others. That is fine. But calling yourself an expert just because you have been playing around with prompts for a few months is not helping anyone. Expertise takes time. It takes failures. It takes patience and perspective.
I still laugh when I see AI Creative Director on a job post. Not because I feel threatened. Because it is nonsense. I think Rodd Chant ®️©️ came up with the rather funny Creaitive Director, or at least owns the domain. A lot of Creative Directors earned that title the slow way over decades. Through work. Leading teams. Solving problems and lessons learned.
Then comes the sting. The uncomfortable feeling when people who could never write suddenly sound better than you. When people who never designed are getting decent UI out of thin air. Developers are seeing AI spit out code. Video editors are watching automation creep into their timeline. The tools are getting smarter. And it is rattling the people who built their careers without them.
This is how it goes. The shift always feels like a threat. Until it becomes the norm.
You do not need to panic. You do not need to start calling yourself something you are not. Or have AI in your title just to be relevant. You do not have to be an expert. You can just be a user. Exploring the tools. Trying things. Stay grounded. Be curious. That is enough.
Storytelling is not better because it was co-written with AI. A perfect sentence means nothing if the message is empty. Nobody cares if you used a semicolon correctly, unless the emphasis really matters. AI has not made me a better writer. But it has helped me stop pretending to be a perfect one. Being myself is what sets me apart. Always has been.
I use the tools. I test new things. I rely on the foundations I spent years building. And I try to stay kind through it all. No judgment. Just forward motion.
I am still figuring it out. Still navigating the noise. But I refuse to be dragged to the extremes. I do not want to be the loudest voice in the room. I just want to keep showing up, doing what I can, and staying open to where it all leads.
Maybe that’s what we all need to focus on right now, not picking sides in the AI wars, but finding our own path through the chaos.
Where do you sit in all of this?