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I’ve looked down on AI-generated content for a while now. I found it generic, limited, and generally lacking substance. Through the sheer volume of it, I feel it lowers the standards of what we will accept as readable, watchable, scrollable content. Who is training whom?

It seems we as a society have grown to accept having our feeds inundated by unintentionally surreal photos, texts that over-explain, and stock footage with voiceovers where the narrator doesn’t quite understand intonation, acronyms, or how to pronounce specific English words.

Though, to be fair, rules for English pronunciation were the subject of Internet memes way before the rise of AI.

But I digress. There’s a paradox here. I constantly use AI, and it has improved my quality of life and even the quality of my writing. So am I contributing to the problem then? Spoiler alert, I don’t think I am.

I ask AI to check spelling and grammar, and I ask it to check phrasing, because English is not my first language. When writing, I ask it to check plausibility. I ask it specific questions like “where is the safety on a Glock 17?”

There is no safety on a Glock 17, by the way. Or on any Glock pistols, for that matter. That was an interesting rabbit hole.

I ask AI to generate some picture I might use as a featured post image. Recently, when working on a trailer for The Silent Season (stay tuned), I asked it to generate some video clips that I then put together. Being new to video editing, I asked AI how to do a lot of stuff. I’m surprised by how nicely it’s coming along.

The important part is that it’s still me in the driver seat. A film director won’t play all the characters himself/herself. They won’t cut and edit footage all by themselves. They won’t draw the poster. There’s a lot more that a director generally won’t do, and it’s still their film.

OK, sometimes they will do a few of these things, but rarely all. Generally, they will hire the people they can afford, and the quality of output will reflect that. Or, they will work harder to hide the gaps.

To me, using AI for creating things is not a way to be lazy. It’s a way to work harder, because it enables expanding the scope of what you can do. It enables you to do things you otherwise couldn’t, or would find daunting. Like writing a book. Promoting said book on a blog and on social media. Making a trailer for that book.

I’m bringing this up now because I want to be transparent. Some of the visuals you’ll see were made with AI, because that was what my budget allowed. The writing? Mine. The Silent Season was written by a human, while AI watched helplessly.

At its worst, AI enables view farmers to make the world a worse place for everyone. At its best, it enables honest people to work harder.

AI doesn’t remove skill barriers, but it lowers them just enough for you to sweat harder, because now you can climb them.