I can’t afford the high ground

About half the people I know are going to hate with me beacuse I use AI in my work. I’m turning fifty this year and I’ve run out of the energy it takes to pretend otherwise.

Before anyone tells me, I know. The environmental cost is real and I don’t argue with it. I’m not here to tell you AI is clean or good or harmless. It isn’t, and I’d rather say that plainly than dress up what I’m doing as something nobler than it is.

And the artists are right. I paint. I don’t sell much of my own work anymore but I make things with my hands and I know what it is to put something real into the world. AI is coming for that, and pretending otherwise would be a lie. I still buy art from actual people. I always have, and a generated image is never going to change that for me. So when a working artist is angry about this, I’m not going to argue with them. They have everything at stake, and they’re not wrong.

The judgment that comes from a little further back

The reaction that lands differently is the kind that comes from people whose work isn’t standing in front of this. There are whole fields where AI isn’t knocking. Nobody’s clients are asking about it, nobody’s tools are quietly defaulting to it, and the people in them get to take a clean position and never once have to test it. I understand the position. It’s easy to hold a line that nothing is pressing on.

Mine presses every single day

I work in branding, marketing, copy, and websites, and AI is in all of it now. It’s in how the copy drafts gets written and how the sites get built, in the SEO, in what clients already expect the whole process to do. I’m not describing a trend I read about somewhere. I’m describing my Tuesday. In my field, refusing to touch any of it doesn’t come across as principled so much as handing the work to whoever will.

I already ran the opt-out experiment

The usual answer to all this is some version of “then go do something else, something analog, something with your hands.” I love that idea. I also already tried it.

It was called Bakettes. My husband and I baked out of our house and sold at the farmer’s market, and we were good at it. We sold out almost every week. By the measure that’s supposed to count as success, it worked.

It still didn’t make enough money.

The gap between successful and enough is the entire problem, because closing that gap means scaling, and scaling costs money – a lot of money.

I can’t bake at home anymore. With animals in the house, North Carolina’s cottage food laws require a pet-free kitchen, so back then we borrowed my mother-in-law’s. That door is closed now. To do it for real I’d need a commercial kitchen, which is rent and equipment and licensing and insurance, and I’d still need other income to carry me to the point where it cleared a profit instead of just turning money over. Being good at it was never the part in doubt. Whether it could ever pay enough was, and at the size I could manage, it couldn’t.

The bills are not make believe

I have a house. I have a car. I have little precious animals that count on me. Ava Belle is thirteen and needs seventeen hundred dollars of dental work, under anesthesia I would rather not put her through, on teeth too bad to leave alone. None of that gets covered by a daydream where I walk away from the skills that earn, and go knead dough into a living the dough has already proven it can not provide.

What I can actually tell you

So I’m not going to stand here and call AI good. I’m not even sure where the lines are. I use a tool that generates things, which probably makes me one of the people that other people hate, and I couldn’t draw you a clean border between “using software” and “the thing you’re not supposed to do.”

What I can tell you is that I don’t have a second skill sitting in a drawer that pays like the one I do have. Most people don’t. And I think a lot of the people certain they would never touch it are simply standing somewhere it hasn’t reached yet. When it gets there, I suspect the certainty gets quieter. I would rather be straight about the corner I’m in right now.

I think I have to use this. I think a lot of you do, too. We just haven’t all said it in the same room yet.