Let’s address the elephant in the room.
Actually, no-let’s deflate it.
AI.
Two letters that seem to send a small shiver down the spine of otherwise perfectly sensible people. I hear the concerns all the time.
‘It’s going to take over’.
‘It’ll replace writers’.
‘Soon no one will need humans at all’.
Really?
Let’s slow this right down.
First things first. The clue is in the name.
Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial.
Not organic.
Not human.
Not conscious.
Not creative in the way people are creative.
Not capable of independent thought, feeling, instinct, judgement, or lived experience.
Artificial.
AI does not wake up one morning with an idea.
It does not feel curious.
It does not want anything.
It cannot decide to create. It can only respond.
And that brings us neatly to the second, crucial point, the one that often gets overlooked in the noise.
AI requires human input.
Always.
Every output has an input.
Every response begins with a human question.
Every “idea” is prompted, shaped, refined, accepted, rejected, or ignored by a person.
AI does not operate autonomously.
It cannot decide to act on its own initiative. It does not go off and ‘do’ things in the world.
Without a human being sitting there, typing, guiding, steering-it does absolutely nothing.
Which is why, bluntly, it is no more of a threat to your livelihood than your fridge.
Useful? Yes.
Powerful? Potentially.
Autonomous? Not even remotely.
Now, let me be very clear about how I use AI. Because transparency matters.
I use it for:
Guidance.
Ideas.
Clarification.
Structure.
Alternative phrasing.
Checking blind spots.
Thinking things through (for me-AI can’t think for itself).
In other words, I use it the same way I might use:
A reference book
A research assistant
A sounding board
A very fast index to an unimaginably large archive of information
And really, let’s call it what it is (ie) the most comprehensive, searchable knowledge archive humanity has ever assembled-and accessible at speed.
How could anyone working professionally with words, ideas, history, or analysis not engage with that?
But, and this matters, I never use it to do the work for me.
Because it can’t.
It doesn’t know my clients.
It doesn’t know their voices.
It doesn’t know what matters to them.
It hasn’t lived their lives.
It hasn’t felt their losses, successes, humour, anger, regret, or pride.
And this is where the analogy really holds.
Think of an architect.
An architect designs a house. They draw the plans. They calculate, imagine, refine, revise. They have vision.
But no one lives in a drawing.
For that house to exist in the real world, you need builders. You need craftspeople. You need hands, judgement, experience, intuition. You need people who know when something doesn’t quite feel right, even if the plan says it should.
AI, in this analogy, is the architect’s drafting table.
Or the reference library beside it.
Or the software that helps visualise possibilities.
I am the builder.
I take ideas, stories, memories, intentions, and raw material and turn them into something real, usable, readable, human.
I know where to sand something back.
I know when to leave a rough edge because it tells the truth.
I know when a sentence needs space to breathe rather than polish to shine.
AI cannot do that.
It doesn’t understand nuance.
It doesn’t understand silence.
It doesn’t understand when not to say something.
And it certainly doesn’t understand people.
This is why I don’t fear AI.
I respect it. I use it. I understand it.
But I don’t outsource my craft to it.
The panic around AI often says more about how little people understand it than about any genuine threat. We’ve been here before. With computers. With word processors. With the internet itself.
Each time, the tools changed.
Each time, the humans who understood their value moved forward.
Each time, the real work still belonged to people.
Stories still come from lived lives.
Insight still comes from experience.
Trust still comes from human connection.
And that, quietly, calmly, confidently, is not going anywhere.
