What makes a creative practice enduring when everything keeps shifting underneath it? That question led me somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
The AI age is doing something interesting to the idea of competence. It’s making it widely available. Faster, cheaper, more accessible than it’s ever been. A solid brief, a clean piece of writing, a functional brand mark... these things no longer require years of skill to produce at a passing standard. Which sounds, on the surface, like a threat.
But follow the logic further and something shifts. When competence is widely available, it stops being the differentiator. What becomes rare, what becomes genuinely hard to replicate, is character. Authorship. The thing that is unmistakably, specifically, irreducibly you.
The edge. The idiosyncrasy. The Northern directness underneath the lyricism. The choice to say the plain thing when everyone else is reaching for the elegant one.
I’ve noticed something about AI-generated work. Everything gets smoothed. The strange corners get rounded off. The sentence that would have made you pause... that slightly-too-honest line, the one that reveals something real... it gets softened into something more palatable. Easier to receive and harder to remember.
The edge is where the magic lives. And the edge is exactly what gets filed down.
There’s a decision I made earlier this year that I keep returning to. Rather than fragmenting my work across separate identities... the musician here, the designer there, the writer somewhere else... I brought everything under one name. One coherent presence. Not because it was strategically clever but because it was the only version that felt true. At the time it was an instinct about integrity. About not performing different selves in different rooms.
What I understand now is that it was also, quietly, the most resilient structure I could have built. Because in an age where AI can produce competent outputs endlessly and cheaply, the only thing that can’t be replicated is a specific person with a specific lens, a specific history, a specific way of seeing. The unity is the strategy. I just didn’t know that yet when I chose it.
I don’t think the future belongs to the most versatile. Or the most prolific. Or the most strategically positioned. I think it belongs to the most true.
The ones who stayed themselves when there was every incentive to become more palatable. The ones who kept the edge when the tools were offering to sand it down. The ones who built something that could only have come from them.
Competence is becoming cheap. Character is becoming everything.