What the fun of using AI doesn’t show you 

Trends always pass between people. And everything can become a trend. Like a song everyone hums for two weeks, or a phrase that shows up in every other caption, same reels - different people, a filter that turns the whole internet the same colour for a while. Well, AI has its own version of this now, and it moves pretty fast too. 

Remember when everyone turned their Instagram posts into Ghibli-style art? For a few days all feed was full of soft skies and round faces, and it was lovely and a little strange at the same time. People who had never opened an AI tool in their life suddenly had a Ghibli version of them with their dog. 

Then, just a few weeks back it was the 80s trend. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was posting a version of themselves with the big hair, coloured clothes and the grainy film look, like a photo pulled straight out of someone's parents' drawer. 

That is the thing about these waves, they pull everyone in, including people who have no real reason to be there. And that's fine. Playing with a new toy is human.

But every wave leaves something behind. We wrote a while ago about how much water AI quietly drinks every time we ask it for something small and silly. The fun is real, no doubts there, but the cost is also real, and it doesn't show up on the screen where the fun happens.

We love this technology. I personally use it every day, our whole team does. I've watched people raise money on it, build apps with it, save weeks of work with it. None of that is in question. What I've been chewing on lately is smaller and harder to measure. If we reach for AI every single time, for everything, without stopping to ask whether we need it, do we slowly hand over parts of ourselves we didn't mean to give away?

What skill has AI made useless, and do you miss it?

I spent last weekend not working, and of course that's exactly when the work thoughts show up. One question kept coming back to me:

What skill do you have that AI has made useless, and do you miss it?

For me the answer came quickly. Slow research.

I used to spend real time reading about an industry before I understood it. Long articles, all kind of reports, the history of a company, the arguments people were having in a field I knew nothing about yet, lots of Reddit threads. It was slow and it was often a mess, but I loved it. Because while I was digging, I was learning. Not the fact I needed for the task, but everything around it. The context. The why. The stuff that made me better at the next project and the one after that.

That's a big part of why I still love this job after 6 years. The learning never stopped. Take the learning out and the work turns flat, a little cold, something you finish instead of something you care about. And i don’t want that! 

AI didn't ban slow research, but it made everyone expect speed. A task that used to get a week now gets a day, because "can't you just ask the AI?" And truth is, you can. The answer arrives in seconds, clean and confident. But I didn't learn anything on the way there. I got the destination and skipped the whole road, and the road was the part that changed me, what i loved about be and this job. 

So yes, I miss it. Not enough to pretend the slow way was always better, but enough to protect a little of it on purpose.

The other opinions on the same question

One answer felt too small to build a whole blog on, so I took the same question to the team in Slack: what skill has AI made useless, and do you miss it? 

A lot of them grieve research the same way I do, though each of them feels it in their own spot. For one, it's the loss of plain googling, of getting a whole messy pile of results and slowly building the picture in her own head before deciding where to aim. AI doesn't let you wander like that anymore. It hands you one clean, confident answer to the exact thing you asked, and the wandering, which was where the understanding used to come from, quietly disappears.

For another, it's creativity that went missing. She told me that back when she searched the long way, she'd trip over an idea she wasn't looking for, catch a bit of inspiration on the side, feel a little spark of motivation she didn't plan on. Now she has to force herself into that state, because it stopped showing up on its own. I felt that one in my chest, because it's true for me too.

Someone described how finding direction used to be this whole ritual. A hundred open tabs, books pulled off the shelf, long stretches of staring out the window while her brain did its quiet work. Half of that is gone now, because the tool offers the options before she even goes looking, and she misses the ritual more than she expected to.

Then there was patience, which stopped me a little. AI made her far less willing to sit with a hard problem for hours. She doesn't miss the frustration, nobody does, but she misses that strange, satisfying moment when your brain finally connects the dots by itself, with no help, and you feel briefly, wonderfully clever.

And in the end, almost all of them circled back to the same feeling. That very human part of working, going step by step, sinking deep into a thing, searching on your own, struggling a bit before it clicks, felt better. The satisfaction at the end was warmer when you'd earned every inch of the road to get there.

The things I'm glad to hand over to AI

I don't want what you read so far in this blog to look like I've turned on AI, because I haven't. There's a long list of work I'm relieved to never do by hand again, and most of it is the kind of thing an agency drowns in. So here's what I happily let AI take:

1. Cleaning up messy data. The spreadsheet someone sent with three date formats and a rogue column. AI sorts it in a minute and I don't lose an afternoon.
2. Turning a two-hour call or a forty-page report into something I can skim. The summary isn't the point of my day, it's the thing standing between me and the point of my day.
3. Pulling patterns out of analytics. Show me where traffic moved and why a number jumped, without me squinting at rows for an hour.
4. First-pass competitor research. A quick map of who's out there and what they say about themselves, so I can go deeper on the ones that matter.
5. The boring formatting work. Meta descriptions, alt text, tags, the small repetitive writing that has to exist and never sparks joy.
6. Rough notes into structure. I dump everything from my head after a client meeting and it comes back as something with a shape.
7. Translating fast. We work across languages here, and a quick, decent translation to build on saves so much back and forth.
8. The spreadsheet formula I'd otherwise google for ten minutes. It writes it, I check it, we move on.
9. Making variations to test. Give me five versions of a subject line so I have something real to react to instead of a blank page.
10. Catching the typo I've read past ten times. My own eyes stop seeing my own mistakes. A second reader that never gets tired is a gift.

Notice what these have in common. They're the parts of the work that were never the work. It’s the setup. The stuff that stood between me and the thinking. Handing that over doesn't cost me anything I wanted to keep. 

The things I will never hand over to AI

Then there's the other list. The work where speed isn't the point and the effort is the whole reason it means something. These are the ones I'd tell anyone to keep for themselves, even when AI could do a passable job.

Birthday cards, and anything like them. The clumsy, personal, slightly-too-long message to someone you care about. A perfect one written by a machine is worth less than an awkward one written by you, because the awkwardness is proof you were there.

Brainstorming the first ideas. AI gives you the average of everything that's been done before, which is a fine place to end and a terrible place to start. The weird idea that goes nowhere is often the one that leads to the good idea three steps later. You only get there by wandering.

Content calendars. Knowing what your audience is tired of, what your brand has been trying to say for months, which moment is worth showing up for. A tool can fill the boxes. It can't feel the rhythm of the people you're talking to. And that is what matters. 

Naming something you care about. A brand, a campaign, a product. The gut feeling that a name is right, or quietly wrong, is yours. AI will give you a hundred options and none of them will make your stomach do the thing that tells you that's the one.

Deciding which idea to kill. Saying no to your own work is one of the hardest and most important skills there is, and it's built entirely on taste you earned the slow way. No prompt can tell you what's worth protecting.

Giving feedback. This is where you have to be honest and kind at the same time, leaning on what you know about that specific person and what they can hear today. Outsource that and they'll feel it, even if they can't name why.

So it comes down to the things you put your name on. Your opinions.
The take that's yours because you lived through the thing that formed it, the one that can't come from anywhere but you. So why hand it over? Why spend your words prompting a machine, editing it a few times, and pasting back what it decided to say, when the whole point was that it came from you?

Conclusion

The point isn't to use less AI. I'll keep using it every day, and so will you, and the work is better for it. The point is to use it on purpose. Notice the difference between the tasks that were standing in your way and the tasks that were making you who you are, and guard the second kind - that is the lesson here. :) 

Reach for AI when you need it. Not because the whole internet went 80’s this month, not because someone asked why it's taking you so long, AND definitely not because it's there and it's easy.

Need is a good reason. Habit is a slippery one. Read this twice. 

The tools will keep getting better. The question worth asking every so often is this one: when AI does the parts that used to make us who we are, who are we becoming?

I'd like to still recognize the answer.

Want to keep going? We've written more about AI

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