05/22/2026
I hate AI too.
Seriously.
I hate the environmental cost.
I hate the power consumption.
I hate the misinformation.
I hate the giant corporations behind a lot of it.
But I also live in reality.
I’m an independent designer/marketer/web person juggling websites, graphics, newsletters, social media, code, troubleshooting, fighting hackers, client communication, and about fourteen other jobs at once.
People love to say “just don’t use AI,” but many of the people saying that are in professions that are not currently being crushed by the same digital productivity race creatives are facing. A dog groomer or mechanic can choose not to use AI tomorrow and probably still have a job next year.
In my field, at this point, it’s pretty much use it or be out of work. I have friends already out of work because they were replaced by AI. Digital creatives, marketers, writers, designers, coders, customer support workers, illustrators, editors, and web developers got hit first and hardest because our work already existed inside computers and networks.
Moreover, independent creatives are absorbing the infrastructure costs of the modern internet from every direction: hosting, platforms, subscriptions, cloud services, Adobe, hardware, electric bills, and now AI tools themselves.
So it’s not like we’re blindly cheering this on. We’re paying for it too. Literally.
In tech-driven fields, there is no luxury of choice. The question is not “Should I embrace AI?”
It is actually: “Can I still compete, and produce enough output to pay my bills?”
Large corporations are already using AI aggressively to cut labor costs, automate workflows, scale marketing, generate content, analyze behavior, and dominate search visibility. They have entire teams and infrastructure behind them. Freelancers and small operators, meanwhile, are being morally lectured for using the same class of tools just to stay economically viable.
The burden of “ethical purity” somehow lands hardest on the people with the least power.
The market already shifted, folks. People can hate that shift all day long, but it doesn’t unshift it.
