i want you to be (actually) competent
"Unique Selling Point" is one of those terms that I could live without every hearing/seeing/thinking about again. But as creators, it’s the golden ticket for having a halfway decent career. Attention is currency and we’re all trying to claw our way out the red. How you do that depends on where you get your advice. Some will tell you it’s editing style and brand colours, others will tell you to signal with your taste, and if you're really desperate you can just pick a signature hair colour and become a household name.
But I think the big USP we're forgetting is competence. I've slowly learned that the antidote to any imposter syndrome or dip in confidence, is a quick reminder that I know what the fuck I'm doing. And many do not. Nor are they good at figuring out what they don't know and how to fix that. I credit tenacity as one of my biggest strengths, but I think it’s safe to say that hard work and an insistence to keep learning, easily assuages most of my fears because the worst thing I can identify with is being stupid. If anything, I constantly want to impress myself.
The unfortunate thing about being competent now, is that AI has entered the mix, so the ability to merely think (come up with a well thought out idea) doesn't impress without immediate proof of concept, which is now just a prompt away. Projects that should take entire teams, revisions, and public consideration, are now at the mercy (probably) of unqualified guys who start most conversations with "hear me out".
Spooky.
Even though I'm an overall novice in design, getting my degree in software engineering means I can appreciate the tedious work that goes from brief to sign off. My group's capstone face recognition software (truly scary to think about now) made me a fan of project management but - obviously - dissuaded me from STEM. But if it took an entire year to present a stack of documentation and a rudimentary prototype to qualify to graduate, where is the bar now? What's the new "competency" when the AI sales team is constantly rebranding and is even at the stage of selling to the most viable market. They really want us to use it. They want us to think that we can’t beat a resource-sucking, art-thieving, glorified chatbot.
But as someone that has smart friends, a working knowledge of how to pirate media, and a general nosey disposition to learn even the most useless things, I have no need for AI. So, when I see it used casually, as part of the “workflow”, I can’t help but be genuinely baffled. And nothing is more off-putting than trying to entertain my hamster brain with its favourite procrastinating pastime (YouTube) in the form of day-in-the-life and creative-related vlogs just to be jolted by a flippant declaration of “I asked Chat-GPT”. If you wanted all my attention that badly, you should’ve just said so because now I want to know what was so out of your realm that you needed an unverified, lie-generating, bias-ridden command prompt window to help you with. Unsurprisingly, the request is always as useless as I expected. One creator used it to help write the copy for a pitch deck. Had to give multiple “clarifying” prompts just to get a response they were obviously already capable of doing themselves in the same amount of time. Job? Creative Director. Another creator, feeling burnt out from their job, asked Chat-GPT what to do and it suggested using their YouTube channel as a creative outlet.
Now…I’ve been watching this person’s videos from the beginning and one of their main reasons for starting YouTube was to have (you guessed it) a non-work-related creative outlet. So why did you need a beep-boop dummy program to tell you that?!
Luckily for me, this is my blog and the rules are all mine and arbitrary at best but I want to take this opportunity to make it very clear that the moment a creator/artist reveals they use AI for basic thinking or worse to generate references, moodboards, whatever, I assume all of their other skills are either a lie, or significantly less proficient than they claim. Hearing “I use Gemini as my therapist and advisor” and “I don’t think they [AI and art] should go together” in the span of 30 seconds (IN THE SAME VIDEO), is, indeed, wild as fuck. There are videos on this exact platform that give tutorials and tips, there are interviews and documentaries featuring people in your craft with advice, there are books (!), and there are reddit forums with the most obscure, yet useful, alternatives and resources you can reference.
(I blame the second-brain epidemic that made people think they needed more than pen and paper to “free up” their minds but that’s a discussion for another day)
Human creation is far too unpredictable to bank against it. AI can't give us this young Ethiopian's resourceful fashion sense nor this Filipino-American's acid jungle project deconstructing their colonial mindset. So, if all it can do is replicate and bastardize, and be deemed competent enough, what standard should we aim for?
Discernment.
All this talk about taste, anti-brain rot, and media literacy is imploring us to exercise our minds to question everything. We're all on our screens, indulging in our platforms of choice, but are we paying attention? We should be. We should be checking sources, assuming the likelihood of propaganda, seeking perspectives outside of US- and euro-centric channels, and forming opinions before seeking others. The competence that will last is unique to human thought because AI cannot think. AI is just a task worker. Whatever art, market copy, or job-related document it can create will always be mediocre because of its unreliable reliance on an amalgamation of work that it doesn't understand. And we are so much better than that. We don’t have to engage with it. There are active ways to resist it (check out Andrea Bartz article on how to resist generative AI). We can also join book clubs with free resources (maybe an anti-brain rot themed one too), watch creators/curators with niche interests (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), or just following fellow AI haters (Kel Lauren is always a good start).
I’m asking you to level up and parade everything you know/are good at. I’m asking you to strive to be human – to think, to live, to create, and to build community. AI slop can only get so far because of the lifeless intention that fuels it. But your mind can always go further.