I Run My Whole Operation on AI and I Still Think It's a Con

Right now a machine is drafting an email that goes to my list tomorrow morning. Another one is tagging songs for my radio station. A third is reading a contract so I don't have to.

I do all of it from a cheap laptop that cost less than a set of tires. One room in Nashville. One guy with a busted back and a stack of pen names.

So when somebody tells me AI is overhyped vaporware that does nothing, I know they're lying, because I watched it do my Tuesday.

And when somebody tells me we're a year out from a god in a server rack that ends all human work, I know they're lying too. I've watched the same machine swear, with a straight face, that a man died in a year he was alive.

Both things hold. The tool works. The story they sell about the tool is a con. Living inside that gap is the whole job now, and almost nobody yelling about this stuff actually lives there.

The two camps are full of people who don't touch the thing

The loudest voices on AI come in two flavors. They share one trait.

The hype men want your money. The doomers want your applause. Neither one is sitting where I sit, which is at the controls, every day, squeezing actual work out of the machine and watching it faceplant in real time.

The guy on stage promising you a superintelligence by Christmas has a stock price to protect. The guy in your feed sneering that it's a plagiarism blender hasn't opened the thing since the bad version two years ago.

They are both performing for an audience. I'm not performing. I've got a newsletter to ship.

You want to know what a tool is good for? Don't ask the salesman. Don't ask the man who hates the salesman. Ask the poor bastard who has to use it to eat.

The part that's real

Let me tell you what the machine actually did for me. This is the part the haters get wrong.

I run a one-man media outfit. A newsletter, fiction under a few names, an internet radio station, a paid members room. That used to be a job for a small staff. A writer, an editor, a producer, somebody to answer the email.

I don't have a staff. I have a disability rating and a mean streak.

The AI is my staff. Not a good staff. A fast one. And it has never once had an idea.

The ideas are mine. The vision is mine. I'm the creative director of a whole transmedia operation, the guy who decides what the radio station and the fiction and the newsletter are even for and how they wire together into one thing. The machine doesn't dream any of that up. It can't. Point it at nothing and it hands you nothing back.

It drafts what I aim it at. I hand the machine a direction, and ninety seconds later it gives me back something that's eighty percent garbage and twenty percent the exact thing I was reaching for. Then I cut. I do the part it can't do, which is know what's good and why it's good.

Without me steering, the thing is a Xerox machine with a thesaurus. It copies. It rearranges. It never creates. I'm the whole difference between a useless copy and something that's actually alive.

Think of it like a forklift. I worked enough jobs around a warehouse to know what a forklift is for. It hoists the heavy thing so your spine doesn't. It does not decide where the pallet goes. You decide. The forklift just saves your back.

That's what AI is for a solo creator. It lifts the heavy, slow, stupid part so you can spend your one human life on the part only you can do.

• It writes the rough draft you were dreading.
• It reads the long boring document and tells you where the teeth are.
• It does the grunt formatting, the tagging, the sorting nobody wants.
• It hands you ten bad titles so the eleventh good one shows up faster.

None of that is magic. All of it is useful. A man with a forklift moves more than a man without one. That's not a religion. That's just Tuesday.

The part that's a con

Now the other half. The valuations. The countdown to the machine god. The trillion-dollar everything.

That's a bubble. I'll tell you why I think so, and you can disagree, because this is my read and not a chart somebody handed me.

The pitch is that the line goes up forever. That the thing helping me draft an email is one or two upgrades from curing death and running the economy. That every company on earth has to set a pile of money on fire right now or get left behind in the rapture.

That's not a technology story. That's a sales pitch wearing a lab coat.

Here's the tell. The wildest promises always come from the people who get paid when you believe them. The deeper somebody is into the bubble, the more sure they are that the bubble is the sky.

Nobody whose paycheck depends on the rapture has ever once told you the rapture is running late.

And the thing has walls I smack into every single day. It makes stuff up with total confidence. It writes in a flat dead voice if you let it. It has no taste, no memory of who you are, no stake in whether your work is any good. A very fast intern who lies, has read everything, and understood none of it.

A tool like that is worth a lot. It is not worth replacing the species. The boring truth sits somewhere between useless toy and silicon god, and the boring truth is where you should live, because it's the only spot that's actually paying rent.

The traps, and I've stepped in most of them

If you're an indie creator and you want to use this without getting played, here are the holes. I know they're there because I've been down a few.

Trap one: letting it write in its own voice

The machine has a voice. It's the voice of a brand consultant on his third coffee with no soul left. Smooth. Helpful. Dead. Every sentence the same length. Every paragraph landing on a tidy little bow.

Ship that and you stop sounding like you. Your voice is the one thing the machine and ten thousand other creators don't have.

The whole game is sounding like a person. Don't let the machine sand you down into nobody.

Trap two: buying the sales deck

Every week there's a new tool promising to ten-x your output, replace your whole stack, and probably your mother. Most of it is the same underlying machine in a shinier box, charging you a monthly fee for a prompt you could've typed yourself.

Don't pay for magic you can do with a cheap tool and ten minutes. The expensive thing is rarely the better thing. It's just the thing with a marketing budget.

Trap three: believing the timeline

They've been promising the godhead is six months out for years. It's always six months out.

Six months out is a beautiful place to keep a promise. You never have to deliver it, and you can sell tickets the whole way. Use the tool that exists today. Ignore the tool that's always about to exist tomorrow.

Trap four: outsourcing your taste

This is the one that'll actually kill you. The drafting, fine, hand that off. But the second you let the machine decide what's good, you're finished.

Taste is the job. Taste is the thing nobody can automate, because it's just you, your scars, your ear, your specific weird read on the world. Give that away and you're not a creator anymore. You're a guy who pastes.

Keep your hands on the wheel

So here's where I land, after a year of running everything I own on a machine I don't fully trust.

Use it. For real. It's the best power tool a broke solo creator has ever been handed, and turning up your nose because the salesmen are insufferable is just spiting yourself to feel pure. The salesmen being insufferable doesn't make the forklift fake.

But never ship the raw output. Ever. Draft fast, then you edit, and your voice stays yours, and the machine never gets a byline.

It lifts. You drive. The day you let it drive is the day you turn into every other guy who let it drive, and there are a lot of those guys, and they all sound exactly the same.

Ignore the priests selling heaven. Ignore the cranks selling smoke. Both of them want something from you, and neither one has a newsletter going out in the morning.

I do. And the forklift's already warmed up.