AI Is an Elaborate Pencil

Everyone has a pencil. Probably a few. But how many people can draw the Mona Lisa? Last I checked, just one.

That's the whole thing with AI. We act like it's foreign, but it's a pencil. The mystery isn't the tool. The mystery is why two people holding the same tool get wildly different results.

Go to art school. Everyone gets the same pencils. Yet only a few walk out the other side as professional illustrators.

So what's going on? Same tools. Same access. Different outcomes.

It's not the pencil. It never was. The people who know how to use the tool reap orders of magnitude more from it. That's how every tool that ever mattered has worked. The piano didn't make pianists. The camera didn't make photographers.

AI feels strange because we're not used to it yet. It's a crazy tool, for—fucking—sure. So we treat it like a phenomenon instead of an instrument. Strip away the novelty and it's the same it's always been.

Most people draw stick figures. That was always true.