This episode started in my monthly Business Circle — a group coaching session with creative business owners — and turned into a rich, honest conversation about what AI actually means for people who make things for a living.
I introduce the idea of AI paralysis: that specific frozen feeling when you know AI could speed things up, but you don't want to lose your voice — so you end up doing neither. It's not the same as the existential fear of being replaced. It's the everyday stuck feeling of the working creative who doesn't have a team and a big budget.
I draw a clear line: for me, AI is a tool for organising — sorting, filtering, summarising, structuring. It is not a tool for creating. My lived experience, my point of view, my specific way of seeing the world. AI can help me organise that once I've found it. It cannot find it for me.
Protect your branding from the AI plastic veneer. Verbal identity, visual identity, the way I communicate with my clients — all of it starts with knowing who I am. That is human work. The episode closes with three reflection questions and a filter — Curiosity, Creativity, Care — to help you find your own conscious position on AI.
5 Key Takeaways
1. AI paralysis is a specific, nameable thing
It's not the fear of being replaced. It's the frozen feeling of knowing AI could speed things up, not wanting to lose your voice, and ending up doing neither. Naming it is the first step out of it.
2. AI organises. You create.
Sorting, filtering, summarising, structuring — these are organising tasks, and AI does them well. They happen before or after the creative work. They are not the creative work. Draw that line clearly and the tool becomes useful without threatening your voice.
3. Your audience can feel the difference
Good AI use is invisible but needs deep knowledge. Bad AI use has a plastic layer over it — generic images, hollow text, a sense that nobody is really there. Creative audiences are perceptive. They notice. And they make choices based on what they notice.
4. Branding is where this matters most
Your verbal identity and visual identity come from knowing who you are. AI can help you organise that once you've found it. It cannot find it for you. Doing the work — slowly, by hand and with the help of a human (like me 😜) if needed — is what makes it actually yours.
5. Knowledge means you get to choose
You don't have to use AI. But choosing not to use it is different from avoiding it out of vague discomfort. Curiosity, Creativity, Care: know enough to decide, stay clear on where your creativity lives, and be honest with your audience about how you work.
AI was used to filter and organise my own creative work and then used to structure and summarise it.