AI is changing a lot of things. That much isn’t up for debate.
Serious conversations are happening about its effects, the potential harms, and the ethical grey areas. I’m not dismissing any of that. We absolutely need to keep our eyes on the ball, and I believe it’s a collective responsibility to watch where this is all heading. The debate around AI companies scraping artists’ work needs to be louder. Artists deserve to be compensated. Full stop.
And yes, some are actively abusing AI in ways that cause real damage. A recent case that stuck with me: an elderly man was scammed out of 1.6 million US dollars of his life savings by someone using AI-generated videos to woo him. He believed it completely. What made it worse was learning that his son works in tech. Someone who could easily warn his father how this kind of deception works. The tools to prevent that harm existed. The conversation just never happened. That’s what collective responsibility actually looks like in practice. It starts at home, in plain language, with the people we care about.
But I also think there are plenty of scenarios where AI is genuinely helpful.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I had a creative idea that took days, sometimes weeks, sometimes a full month to work out, only to execute it and realise it was a dud. Dead on arrival. A lesson in disguise that feels like a complete waste, at the time. It truly sets you back emotionally and mentally.
What AI has done for me is compress that timeline. The rate at which I can now create, execute and learn has shortened my feedback loop in ways I couldn’t have predicted. I’m not the only one experiencing this either.
Business thinkers have long preached that the ability to execute, fail, learn and course-correct is part of the formula for success. AI accelerates exactly that cycle.
Sure, some ideas need to breathe and develop slowly. Real craft takes time, and the effort you put into something often translates directly into its value. I’m all for that, but other ideas, the ones you need to test quickly to know whether they’re worth pursuing at all, can and should move fast.
I never subscribed to Facebook’s old “Move fast, break things” mentality. They broke a lot of things moving too fast, without enough concern for the consequences. But learning from potential failure? That, I believe in completely.
For someone like me, constantly curious and always running multiple ideas in parallel, AI saves mental energy and gives me options. I can take a rough draft, feed it in, and quickly see whether a direction is worth pursuing. Sometimes it confirms my instincts. Sometimes it enriches what I’ve already created. Sometimes it saves me from a month of effort on something that was never going to work.
At this point, with AI so widely used and genuinely breaking barriers for people across industries, I think we’re asking the wrong question. It was never really about whether or not to use AI.
The real question is simpler than that: do you want to save time, or not?