I Don't Argue About This Anymore.

A producer reached out a couple of weeks back. A decent, considered podcast, the kind of platform I’d normally take without thinking twice, and I was genuinely grateful to have been asked. The brief was AI and the future of my industry. I could feel exactly where the conversation was heading before it started. It’s a tired, old conversation, and it’s time we moved on from it. So I declined.

Not because I don’t have anything to say. Because I’ve already said it, to myself, for three years, and I’m no longer interested in relitigating it for an audience that mostly wants the drama, not the answer.

Here’s what I’d have told them anyway. A significant number of very senior people in my industry are already deep into this, quietly. Folding it into their process and not broadcasting it publicly. Not because it’s shameful. Because the conversation still assumes the worst version of what’s happening, and nobody senior wants to spend their credibility correcting that assumption in public.

Industries change. Mine isn’t special in that respect. Streaming gutted the music business overnight, then quietly rebuilt half of it. Off-the-shelf template tools decimated a whole tier of graphic design work, and opened up a different tier for people who’d never have had a way in otherwise. Something almost always takes a livelihood on the way through. Something else almost always opens because of it. Not a comfortable sentence, but an honest one, and pretending otherwise doesn’t protect anyone. Painters said much the same about cameras when photography first hit the scene in 1839. Digital did much the same to an entire industry built on film and darkrooms a century and a half later. Same shape, every time. I could go on, but you get the point.

I’m not being noble about this. Nobody’s coming to rescue my income at this stage of my career if I refuse to move with what’s actually happening. I use these tools because they let me keep working, properly, at the standard I’ve always held myself to, and they’ve added immense value to my work, and then some.

But it stopped being only practical a while ago. I started properly in 2021, diving into a tool called Jarvis, a wrapper for GPT-3 that predates ChatGPT by the best part of two years. Barely anyone remembers Jarvis now. I remember exactly what it felt like to be early. The deeper I’ve gone since, the more it’s opened up. Work that’s been recognised, published, awarded, none of which I take lightly. People criticised the direction the entire time I was building it, and I kept going anyway. I’m glad I did, because somewhere in the middle of all that it turned into something I genuinely enjoy, not just professionally. Closer to a hobby than a task, these days. It’s also given me something unexpected: a community. Everyone who got into this early took the same criticism, publicly and privately, and there’s a genuine bond in that. Some of the most talented, generous people I’ve met in twenty-five years came through this world, not despite the noise around it, but because of it.

None of that is an argument, and I’m not offering it as one. A committee rejected a urinal in 1917 on the grounds that it wasn’t art, hid it behind a partition, and got overruled by history within a decade. I don’t need that story to prove my point anymore, only to remember why I stopped needing to make one.

I’ll leave the arguing to the committee, pearls in hand, partition ready. I’ve got work to finish.