Don't use AI as a crutch.

Right now, approximately 475,000 people are trying to sell you a course or app that will ✨use AI to make weeks of content in just minutes!✨

But there’s two problems with that:

The “content” they make is trash.

I’ve tried them all, and the output it always very mediocre. Want to improve it? Spend hours creating a better prompt, then more time editing the output— and then you’ve put in 2x more work than just doing it from scratch (for worse results).

But that’s not the real problem:

Outsourcing your thinking to AI makes your brain weaker

Depend on AI too much and your brain will get soft and weak, just like your muscles would atrophy if you camped out on the couch 24/7 and had servants bring you a plate of Twinkies every 10 minutes.

Using AI to automate tedious timewasters? Hell yes (I absolutely love AI notetakers like Fathom, for example).

But using it as a crutch to avoid thinking? That’s a very, very bad idea.

With that said, I’m not an AI hater at all. I actually love AI— as long as it’s used for the right things:

Use it to make the impossible, possible

Having AI write a LinkedIn post or some landing page copy is like using the Space Shuttle to take you to the mall… I guess you could, but you shouldn’t.

The real value of AI is when it enables you to do things that would never be possible (or profitable) if you had humans do them— these are things that can literally 10x your business almost overnight, or create entirely new businesses that leave everyone else in the dust.

I know, I know— I hate sounding like one of those AI hype bros, but I’ve seen so many examples from my clients and friends that showed me AI is way, way more than using ChatGPT to write social content:

Rory Flynn built an insane system that takes a handful of client-supplied images and creates hundreds of ad creatives using Midjourney and Figma. This is MONTHS of human work that would be absurdly expensive— AI will do it in a couple days with a little human hand-holding.

Shawn from Digitsu created an app that breaks down 30k jiu-jitsu matches, 11k athletes and 1.6k competitions: what techniques win matches most often, which competitors win most often with each technique, etc etc.

It’s already getting indexed and bringing him traffic— a little CRO and I think it will be amazing an organic acquisition channel.

One of my company’s websites increased our search volume by 50x in a month using programmatic SEO content (several thousand blog articles created by AI). It’s not converting very well, so we still have some work to do— but when you hit 50x in 4-5 weeks, you can’t complain too much!

Hats off to Pattern for their help on this, hit them up if you want help with AI SEO!

I’ve also been experimenting with all the AI software development tools like Lovable, Cursor and Bolt— you can literally just tell them what app to build, and they’ll do the rest. It’s as insane as it sounds! They definitely aren’t quite ready for deploying production code yet, but they’ll get there.

My point:

Don’t use AI as a shortcut for doing the intellectual work of writing an email, LinkedIn post, landing page, etc. The quality will suck, and you’ll make yourself dumber in the long run.

But DO think about the ways it could create totally new opportunities for you that didn’t exist or weren’t feasible before— I haven’t felt like there were this many openings since the early-ish days of mobile (2009-2013 or so).

And please don’t ever, ever, EVER use AI to automate comments or DMs ☺️