How a machine I didn’t trust taught me to be bad at things again.
I was a skeptic.
Let the record show, I too, was against it.
When Ted Chiang wrote in The New Yorker that AI isn’t going to make art, I felt vindicated. I forwarded it. To people who had not asked (sorry).
His point was that art is the sum of thousands of small choices, and a machine that makes most of them for you has removed the art. I summarized this at dinners as “it’s a vending machine with ambitions,” which got an eye roll and some confused looks.
Writing is my home turf. I own about 14 favorite pens. I have opinions about semicolons. So when a machine showed up promising to write for me, I reacted the way a cat reacts to a new cat: I sat very still, judged it from across the room, and waited for it to leave.
I first got really riled up when a client called my writing “too AI” for using my dear Oxford comma and trusty em-dash. Things started feeling personal then, and they have ever since.
AI has never made a single thing I’m proud of. But it did something weirder, and honestly better. It made me brave enough to be a beginner again, in mediums I’d been too scared to touch for years.
Let me explain.
Every medium has a bouncer.
Every medium has a bouncer. It’s a feeling rather than a person. And some mediums have a friendlier door policy than others.
In a ceramics studio it’s the sense that everyone else knows where the good glaze is hidden and has agreed not to tell you. In coding it’s the suspicion that you must already know what a terminal is before you are allowed to ask what a terminal is.
The bouncer doesn’t check your talent. He checks whether you look like you belong. And for most of my adult life, I have walked up to the door of some new medium, made eye contact with him, said “never mind, I’m a writer,/designer/not-this” and gone home.
Why? Well, imposter syndrome. It took me roughly 35 years to accept that, no matter the success, we all feel it.
I made a very active effort to convert myself.
AI actually played a bigger role in it than I’d like to admit. And yet I’m admitting it here because it was not the obvious — the machine making anything for me. It was that I could finally ask the stupid question. At eleven at night. Forty times in a row. Without anyone sighing, checking their phone, or saying “well, it’s pretty basic.” This made the much-dreaded learning curve suddenly feel totally in my control, on my own terms, and more like a fun slip-and-slide rather than Sisyphus’ hill.
So…for example…how do you write a truly three-dimensional character? What is a web repo? And what am I not getting about Picasso?
Three questions. Three mediums. Old me would have needed a writing course, a very patient developer friend, and maybe an art history degree.
New me needed one evening and zero dignity.
And it’s not just me feeling brave btw. When researchers from Stanford and MIT gave an AI assistant to more than 5,000 customer support agents, the newest, least experienced people got 34% more done per hour. The veterans? Barely changed. The researchers’ explanation: the tool passes along what experienced people know and helps newcomers move down the learning curve faster.
Translation: AI is kind of wasted on experts and a gift to beginners. And in every new medium, guess who’s the beginner?
The gatekeeping, it turned out, was mostly mine. I had been running the door on myself.
A brief history of reply guys.
It comforts me that we have been here before. Many, many times. Actually.
Around 370 BC, Plato wrote down Socrates complaining that writing would make people forgetful and give them the look of wisdom without the real thing. Writing. My home turf. The very first AI panic was about my favorite pen. (And yes, we only know Socrates hated writing because someone wrote it down.)
In 1492, a fellow German, the abbot Johannes Trithemius, wrote In Praise of Scribes, a passionate case that monks should keep copying books by hand because the printing press would make them lazy. Then he had it printed. What a diva was he? Iconic.
Then, in 1859, reviewing the Paris Salon, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and my second favorite poet with the initials CB, announced that photography was where untalented, lazy painters went to hide. He loved ragebait. If he’d had a comments section, he would have lived in it for sure.
Around the same time, the painter Paul Delaroche reportedly declared that painting was dead. Painting has now been dead for roughly 165 years and is doing great. It has gallery representation. It has a podcast. It probably has a trust fund.
Photography, meanwhile, became a medium in its own right, with its own geniuses and its own snobs who now say the same things about phones.
That is the pattern. History repeating herself.
Every new medium gets called cheating by the people who are good at the old one. I know this because I was one of them (remember that article I forwarded?).
But I broke that generational trauma.
Because here’s what the reply guys always miss: the tools that made a medium easier never kill it. They crack it open. And yeah, that is kinda scary. Mostly, if you’re an insecure dude, I guess?
Before 1841, painters stored their oil paint in pig bladders tied with string. Then a broke American portrait painter named John Goffe Rand patented the collapsible paint tube. Suddenly paint was portable, painters walked outside, and Renoir later said that without tubes there would have been no Monet, no Cézanne, no Impressionism at all. Wild.
Anyhow, easier didn’t mean worse. Easier meant more people, in more places, painting things nobody had painted before. That’s what a lower learning curve does. It lets more people in. I’m unfortunately woke enough to think that’s a good thing.
Craft is just a conversation with your material.
The sociologist Richard Sennett describes craft as a conversation with your material. You push, it pushes back, and that resistance is what forces you to revise and, eventually, to get good.
Wood has a grain. Clay collapses when you’re impatient. Watercolor does whatever it wants and then dries in a shape that looks like a disappointed relative that puts your toddler in tears.
AI pushes back too, just in a more humiliating way.
It does exactly what you said instead of what you meant. Often cheerfully, with bullet points to really drive the point home. Ugh.
For someone who writes a lot, this is a daily performance review of my own clarity. The resistance is in the gap between the idea in my head and the sentence I typed (or spoke). That gap has a…texture. You kinda learn to feel it.
That, I’m sorry to report to my former self, is a medium.
Brian Eno wrote in his diary in 1995 that whatever feels weird and ugly about a new medium tends to become its signature.
So I look at AI’s current tics (the extra fingers, the relentless enthusiasm, the word “delve”) with new tenderness.
In twenty years someone will add them back on purpose and call it vintage. And if you know me, you know I’m a sucker for that.
Fluids take the shape of their container.
Don’t worry, I have not totally drowned myself in the Kool-Aid. There is something that keeps me from becoming one of those people who post sunrise photos captioned “the future is here.”
I’ve already ranted about this in The taste paradox, so here’s the short version. When researchers handed writers AI-generated story ideas, the stories got rated as more creative. They also got more alike. Everyone got better, and everyone got a little more the same.
I’d been calling AI a fluid medium as a compliment. I forgot what fluids do.
Water has no shape of its own. It takes the shape of whatever holds it.
The container is you.
That’s pretty poetic. I mean, unless you’d prefer Tupperware.
Your taste, your oddness, the thing you notice that nobody else does. Which is why, on my home turf, I use it to teach me stuff that helps me reach more people. In my case, that’s making social media assets and finding other creators to engage with.
A tool that makes everyone a competent writer is a threat only to writers whose main feature was competence. Lucky for me, I’ve always been more rebel than competent.
The medium it never touched.
I have been doing a lot of things I’ve always been interested in and too afraid to try, with less fear than ever. Because really, AI didn’t teach me coding. It taught me that starting from zero is survivable. And it showed me how I learn: by asking the dumb question first and making the ugly version second. That lesson doesn’t stay inside the chat window. It leaks. Into my life. Even my parenting!
So yes, I think AI is a fluid medium. And so is the courage it leaves behind. Two liquids, one glass: the tool pours you into a new medium, and the courage keeps you there. Liquid courage, minus the hangover and the text messages you regret. Win-win.
The bouncer is still standing at the door of every medium I haven’t tried yet. He just looks smaller now. Like someone I could easily body-tackle or win against in a rap battle.
The point?
Be a beginner again.
On purpose. Pick the medium you’ve always been too scared to try, the one with the meanest bouncer. Ask it the stupid question tonight. Then go make something ugly with your actual hands.
Nicole is a Content Designer turned Design Director based in Stockholm, Sweden. She potters, writes poetry, and raises little girls in a house by a meadow. You can follow her writing here or get it directly to your inbox via her publication, eggwoman. Nicole is on LinkedIn. Find her portfolio at nicoletells.com.
Every new medium gets called cheating was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.