Al seems popular because it lets the unskilled feel skilled, the uncreative feel artistic, and the uninformed feel intelligent.
I keep seeing the same pattern: someone with zero design background generates a logo and calls themselves a "brand designer." Someone who's never debugged a real system pastes AI code into production and calls themselves a "developer." Someone who couldn't structure an argument to save their life gets ChatGPT to write it and suddenly has Opinions they're very confident about.
None of these people got more skilled. They got access to a machine that can imitate the output of skill. And that's a very different thing.
The tell is what happens when it breaks. Ask the "designer" why they used that font pairing and they can't tell you. Ask the "developer" to fix a bug without pasting the error back into the chatbot and watch them freeze. Ask the "writer" to defend their own argument in a conversation and they collapse, because it was never their argument — it was autocomplete wearing their name.
This is why AI feels so good to use and so uncomfortable to think about. It's not neutral like a calculator — a calculator doesn't let you feel like a mathematician, it just gives you the number. AI gives you the whole performance: the confident tone, the polished structure, the appearance of expertise. It's optimized to sound right, not to make you capable.
I'm not saying the tools are useless — they're genuinely great for people who already have the underlying skill and want to move faster. The problem is the huge number of people using it as a substitute for skill rather than a multiplier of it, and mistaking the fluency of the output for their own competence.
Curious if others have noticed this in their own field — where's it most obvious to you?
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