Reframing your view of AI doesn’t mean submitting to our robot overlords. It means understanding how to use AI as a tool, a helper—not as a replacement for human creativity.
Mention AI to some people and their immediate reaction is hostility. AI is a threat, AI is replacing human workers and taking away jobs, AI steals others’ work, or even, AI will enslave humanity!
This level of hyperbole and fear is understandable. AI is relatively new tech, and it has grown up in public. We all remember those AI-generated images with too many fingers, and those nightmare-inducing images generated by Deep Mind early in AI’s development.
To be totally honest, I was once one of those people. As a creative professional and artist, I felt threatened by what I saw as AI’s encroachment into my field and passions. And frankly, I still see ways in which it does that. However, once I started messing around with AI I quickly saw its potential and its weaknesses.
AI as assistant, not replacement
I firmly believe AI has its place in our work and our lives. I don’t like using it to generate art or video from whole cloth. That still feels like overreach, even though there are those who will use it for such (and they may be your competitors!). Besides, as of this writing, the results are still somewhat obvious — and then there’s the potential for backlash. Using AI for visuals can negatively impact your image.
I believe where AI really excels is in:
• Research and connecting the dots
AI can not only make tracking down and verifying data a breeze, it can also collate data and draw inferences and make connections quickly and in a way that you might not yourself.
Of course, to quote that old Cold War adage, trust, but verify.
No matter what you’re doing with AI, you should always inspect the output for errors and hallucinations (ie AI ‘making stuff up’), because that is always a possibility.
• Idea generation and brainstorming inspiration
One thing I love using AI for most is as a sounding board. AIs like Claude.ai and ChatGPT are great for bouncing ideas around and helping me break out of thought patterns to look at something in new ways.
Need to figure out why a plan isn’t delivering the right results? Need insight into the needs and pain points of a particular audience? Need to re-evaluate your own career path? AI can help you get there faster, in a back-and-forth conversational way that keeps inspiration flowing.
• Organization
AI can help create anything from a simple to-do list to a comprehensive business plan ready to submit to your funders. It can even help neurodivergent people (like me with ADHD) be more productive by working with how we work. This has been a game changer for me, personally.
• Draft writing for content
AI can write that first draft, saving you hours of work. You can give it criteria, suggest tone and vibe, and even have it perform multiple review & revise cycles before submitting its output. But then it’s up to you to put on your editor hat and tweak AI’s work — check it for errors, request revisions and rewrites, anything a professional editor would do on the job. You will still have saved a ton of time.
• Reviewing and enhancing content
AI can also flip that script, taking what you’ve written yourself and help you improve its quality, clarity and impact. It can be your editor, or just a second set of eyes to help you get your point across, adapt for a particular audience or purpose, translate to other languages, and help you produce better content faster.
I once had AI rework a clumsily written college recommendation letter and in seconds it delivered a beautifully-written endorsement filled with warmth and enthusiasm, all including the specifics of my original draft!
AI can also help you generate supplemental materials to support your main content like infographics, slide decks, and storyboards for video or scripts for podcasts.
• Workflow optimization
Probably the best known use of AI is grunt work—repetitive and low-level tasks that are often the underpinning of any project. For example, let’s take that content we wrote earlier and let’s assume it’s a blog post. AI can repurpose it into a Facebook post, a LinkedIn article, a series of posts for Bluesky or X, and a script for a TikTok or Instagram video—all in seconds instead of days.
The overall point here is not that AI does all the work, but that it saves you time by shortening development cycles so you can see and test results faster. You still have to do something, just at a higher level in the process.
AI is the next Industrial Revolution. Might as well get on board now!
Every major new technology has been met with its detractors. Steam power that fueled the first Industrial Revolution, electricity, radio and television broadcasting, computers, microwave ovens, the Internet. But those things still became integral parts of our lives and changed how we live and work (and most would say, for the better).
AI is no different. It doesn’t make you a Luddite to question the place AI has and will have in our lives, it just makes you a responsible citizen. Questions must be asked, ethics considered, and regulations enforced. But in the end, AI is not going away. It will replace some jobs, but will also create other jobs in related fields, same as all those other technologies did.
AI is also not Skynet or The Matrix or any other sci-fi scenario (and this is coming from someone who loves sci-fi). AI is just a new kind of screwdriver, a better mousetrap. Instead of fearing it or rejecting it, learn how to harness it. I promise it will eventually become part of the background of our everyday, and in a way that enhances humanity rather than replaces it.
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Want to know more about how to use AI in your work and life? I’m creating a short, no-pressure workshop that goes beyond the usual how-to. You’ll understand AI in a clear, fundamental way that makes everything click, so you can shape it to fit your way of creating, working, and living.
You don’t need to be techy, just curious. If that’s you, let me know and I’ll add you to my announcement list.