In 2013, the Chicago Sun-Times fired all 28 of its staff photographers. Every single one. Including John H. White, who had won a Pulitzer Prize.
The plan was simple. Reporters would shoot their own photos using iPhones. The technology had gotten good enough. The cameras were in everyone’s pockets. Why pay 28 salaries for something the existing staff could do with a device they already owned?
The iPhone gave everyone access to the same lens, the same megapixels, the same processing power that professionals were using. Photography had been democratized. The playing field was level. The barrier to entry was gone.
And the photos were terrible.
Not because the cameras were bad. The cameras were fine. The photos were terrible because the reporters didn’t know what to look for. They didn’t understand light. They didn’t feel composition. They couldn’t sense the moment before it happened the way a photographer who’d spent twenty years training their eye could feel it the way you feel a change in weather.
The tool was identical. The taste was not.
Within a year, the Sun-Times started quietly rehiring photographers. The experiment was over. The democratization of the tool had revealed something nobody wanted to admit: access was never the gap. Judgment was the gap. And giving everyone the same camera didn’t close it. It made it painfully, publicly visible.
This is exactly what’s happening with AI right now.
And almost nobody is talking about it honestly.
The lie that sounds like good news
The story everyone’s telling about AI goes like this: the barriers are falling. Anyone can write now. Anyone can code. Anyone can design, build, launch, create. The tools that used to cost thousands of dollars and years of training are now free and instant. The little guy finally has a shot.
It’s a beautiful story. It’s the kind of story that gets standing ovations at tech conferences and thousands of likes on LinkedIn.
It’s also wrong.
Not entirely wrong. The barriers are falling. Anyone can access these tools. That part is true. But the conclusion everyone draws from it, that the gap between the best and the rest is shrinking, is the opposite of what’s actually happening.
The gap is widening. Fast.
Because AI didn’t just give tools to the people who didn’t have them. It gave better tools to the people who were already ahead. And those people, the ones with taste, judgment, and a decade of reps, are using AI the way a master chef uses a sharper knife. Not to replace their skill. To extend it.
The person who already understands storytelling is using AI to write more, faster, with higher quality. The person who doesn’t understand storytelling is using AI to produce more slop, faster, at higher volume.
Same tool. Wildly different output. And the distance between those two outputs is growing every single day.
What the tool can’t give you
Ira Glass said something years ago that nobody fully appreciated at the time. He was talking about creative work, but he was accidentally describing the future of AI:
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.”
That gap, between your taste and your ability, used to be closed by years of practice. Thousands of reps. Late nights. Bad drafts. Failed launches. Slowly, painfully, your skill caught up to your eye.
AI compressed that timeline. Dramatically. If you have taste, you can now produce work that matches it in a fraction of the time. You can iterate faster, prototype faster, test faster. Your taste becomes the bottleneck instead of your technical skill, which means the people with the best taste are suddenly producing at a level that was physically impossible two years ago.
But here’s what AI didn’t do. It didn’t give anyone taste.
You can hand someone ChatGPT and tell them to write a newsletter. If they don’t understand what makes writing land, what makes a sentence earn its place, why one opening grabs you and another slides off like water, they’ll produce something that looks like a newsletter the same way a reporter’s iPhone photo looked like journalism. Technically sufficient. Emotionally dead.
You can hand someone Midjourney and tell them to design a brand. If they can’t feel the difference between a design that breathes and one that suffocates, they’ll generate a hundred options and pick the wrong one. Every time. Because the tool can generate. It can’t select. It can’t taste. It can’t feel the difference between almost right and right.
That feeling is the whole game now. And no tool on earth can install it.
The excuse economy is collapsing
This is the part that gets uncomfortable.
For years, most people had a legitimate reason for not doing the thing. The tools were expensive. The skills took too long to learn. The barriers were real. You needed money, access, connections, training, equipment, time.
Those excuses are dying. One by one, AI is killing them.
Can’t write? AI will draft it. Can’t code? AI will build it. Can’t design? AI will mock it up. Can’t research? AI will summarize it. Can’t afford a team? AI will be your team.
The tools are free. The access is universal. The knowledge is instant.
And what’s left, when you strip away every external barrier, is the thing most people have been hiding behind those barriers their entire lives:
Do you actually have something worth saying? Do you have the taste to know the difference between good and great? Do you have the work ethic to keep refining when the first output is “good enough”? Do you have the judgment to know what to build, not just how to build it?
Those questions used to be optional. You could avoid them for an entire career by pointing to the barriers. “I would start that business, but I can’t afford a developer.” “I would write that book, but I don’t have the time.” “I would launch that product, but I don’t have the resources.”
AI removed every one of those shields. And now you’re standing in the open, with the same tools as everyone else, and the only variable left is you.
For the people who were already good, this is the best thing that’s ever happened. They just got handed a jet engine for a vehicle they already knew how to steer.
For everyone else, it’s a mirror they didn’t ask for.
The taste test
So here’s the practical question: how do you know if you’re the person AI is accelerating or the person it’s exposing?
There’s a simple test. Look at something you created with AI, whether it’s writing, design, code, a strategy doc, a pitch deck, anything.
Now ask yourself honestly: Did I make it better than what the tool gave me, or did I just accept what the tool gave me?
That’s it. That’s the entire dividing line.
The people AI is accelerating look at the first output and feel friction. Something’s off. The structure is wrong. The tone is flat. The insight is surface-level. They can’t articulate exactly what’s missing, but they feel it. And they go back in. They rewrite. They restructure. They throw away 80% and keep the 20% that has life in it. They use AI as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter.
The people AI is exposing look at the first output and think, “That’s pretty good.” They hit publish. They ship the deck. They send the email. Not because it’s great, but because it’s passable, and passable used to be enough when the barriers kept most people from producing anything at all.
It’s not enough anymore. When everyone can produce passable, passable becomes invisible. The floor rose. And if you’re standing on the floor, you just disappeared.
The three things AI can’t replace
If you want to be on the right side of this, here’s what to invest in. Not tools. Not prompts. Not workflows. These three things:
Taste. The ability to feel the difference between good and great. This only comes from consuming great work and producing bad work for long enough that your eye develops judgment. Read things that are beautifully written. Study design that makes you stop. Listen to conversations that change how you think. Then make things and compare them honestly to the standard you admire. The gap will hurt. That’s the gap doing its job.
Point of view. AI can synthesize any existing perspective. It cannot generate a new one. Your unique combination of experiences, beliefs, scars, obsessions, and observations is the one thing that cannot be replicated, automated, or optimized. The more deeply you develop your own perspective, the more valuable you become in a world drowning in competent sameness.
Reps. AI makes each rep faster. It doesn’t make the number of reps smaller. The person who ships fifty newsletters, gets feedback, iterates, and ships fifty more will always crush the person who ships one AI-generated newsletter and wonders why nobody cared. Volume with feedback is still the only path to mastery. AI just lets you walk it faster. But you still have to walk.
Where this goes
Here’s what I think happens over the next five years, and I don’t think most people are ready for it.
The middle disappears. Not slowly. Fast.
Mediocre writing, mediocre design, mediocre strategy, mediocre code, mediocre anything, produced by people who are using AI to reach “good enough” without ever developing taste, will become completely worthless. Because AI itself will produce “good enough” for free. There will be no market for human-made mediocrity when machine-made mediocrity costs nothing.
What survives, what thrives, is the stuff that AI can’t produce on its own. Work with a point of view. Work with taste that comes from a real person who’s lived a real life and developed real judgment. Work that makes you feel something that a prompt couldn’t have generated because the feeling comes from a place the model has never been.
The gap between the people who have that and the people who don’t will be the defining economic divide of the next decade. Not education. Not access. Not even intelligence.
Taste, judgment, and the willingness to do the work even when the tool makes it easy not to.
AI gave everyone the same camera.
It didn’t give everyone the same eye.
Thank you for reading,
— Scott
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