AI and the Democratization of Mediocrity
Artificial intelligence has become impossible to ignore. In just a few years it has gone from novelty to necessity, from curiosity to co-worker, and almost everyone who earns a living by thinking or creating is now being forced to prove they still can.
I mean, it’s a big deal. We’re telling machines what to do, and they’re doing it!
I’ve realized I should have more than an opinion… I should have a philosophy. And as President and Creative Director of a creative services firm, that philosophy should extend beyond me to policy.
Consumer AI barely existed five years ago.
Today it writes, illustrates, codes, researches, edits, summarizes, translates, and increasingly participates in nearly every creative profession. That’s an astonishing pace of change.
Now, in mid-2026, AI is in every application. I have at least two friends whose jobs were completely replaced by AI and they have had to reinvent themselves. If nothing else this should teach us that you cannot fight it and win.
The question isn’t whether AI will become part of our work because it already has. The question is whether we remain the editor, the curator, and the final decision maker.
I’ve come to believe that AI delivers its greatest value when paired with human judgment.
As models improve almost daily those adjustments might become finer but there will always be a need for the engineer to assemble the big picture. AI might replace coders but not software engineers, it might replace copywriters but not managing editors, it might replace graphic artists but not strategic brand managers… calculators didn’t replace accountants, Photoshop didn’t replace designers, CAD didn’t replace architects, spreadsheets didn’t replace CFOs…
Like any tool, artificial intelligence raises the floor, but it doesn’t raise the ceiling.
AI won’t eliminate expertise, it will increase the value of people who know what good is.
It’s such a hot issue because of the wave of DIYers who insist on unleashing AI results without any engineering. This has lovingly been nicknamed AI SLOP and there is, thankfully, a public backlash that is tempering the impulse.
To be crystal clear, AI SLOP is not slop because AI made it, it’s slop because nobody cared enough to edit it.
The use of AI as a tool in the communications field, a discipline I have always contended is 50% art and 50% science, can be– much like a design, writing or desktop publishing program– accessed and used by anyone. But the results are similar. Leveraging AI in strategic marketing is, again, as much art as it is science and it does not account for taste or experience.
Similar to the dullard walking through the museum and loudly proclaiming, “I could do that” while eyeing a Rothko, they are mistaken. They could procure the paints, brushes and canvas and make an attempt but they would soon realize that there are real innate abilities that translate to the science of painting and real intrinsic qualities in the human creator that translate to the art.
What they could never reproduce is the lifetime of decisions, instincts, influences, restraint, failures, and taste that produced it.
I use AI every day. It has made me faster, more curious, and more willing to explore ideas I might have abandoned too early. It has become part of my process. It asks good questions, surfaces patterns, and occasionally surprises me. But every meaningful decision still belongs to me. It has not become my judgment.
Artificial intelligence is an extraordinary tool for humans but tools have never replaced craftsmanship. They amplify it, expose it, or diminish it depending entirely on the hands that hold them.
PALM READER 