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There needs to be a name for this phenomenon where every published piece of art by a company is now accompanied by a proof-of-human video.
— Benjamin Mayo
Apple basically showed two artisans crocheting the Apple logo onto a fabric. It was used as the invite for an Apple event.
It’s strange and necessary how much reverence and spotlight is on old-fashioned craft. I use the word craft broadly.
I use AI for deeper research, double check math, debate ideas and make sense of math in studies and contextualise multiple studies on a single topic. Things I would never be able to do with just a Google search. And I do not have the skill to do those things without AI. The logic of the argument stays mine.
How aware am I of the skills I do not possess? A LinkedIn post or a polished presentation is an easy forum to blend or merge my thinking with ideas or facts that AI came up with and present me as an authority. Without knowing your original argument, you can have no idea how much AI closed the gap.
This goes beyond just em-dashes, familiar tone and use of certain phrases. This goes to the heart of understanding something. If something I said sold a person on working with me and they pay me to work with me only to find out my skill levels are far below the quality of arguments and my writing, the client will be sorely disappointed.
In the early aughts, the painstaking process of finding academic papers to understand something meant combing through journals and reading textbooks. Google, YouTube and PubMed (GYP) slashed that curve. Now AI does it even more. But do we know what was lost in each step? Combing through journals led to serendipitous discoveries. And you couldn’t do it without some knowledge of statistics or advanced math. GYP allowed you to find exactly what you wanted. Even after cherry picking, the interpretation was still on you. With AI, that work turns optional. It will tell people exactly why a study makes sense for the argument you were making. Even if you understood none of it.
The verisimilitude or facade of understanding without the foundations that allow you to use the damn knowledge when you’re actually working.
I had these mentorship calls with sports scientist Chris Beardsley. The call would flood me with an overwhelming amount of science and information. It took multiple listens and reads to make sense of it. And then use it on the gym floor with exercise selection and dial in dosages.
I treat AI the same way. I’ll write an argument, find a couple of studies, write something crude and then plug it into Claude. And then argue away. But never really allow my tone or words to be altered. It’s me saying something after understanding it.
It’s like a tool for iteration, learning and reinforcement. It can be a forever crutch or it can be the most precise calliper. How you use it will determine if you’re becoming smarter or stuck parroting thoughts you never internalise.