AI and the Great Flattening

On a recent planning call for Your ICONIC Year cohort, I shared that though I’d had a surprisingly excellent quarter, I was feeling a little flat.

Which felt almost rude.

I’d just come back from a dream vacation with my family to Greece. I had spoken on stages I was delighted to be on. I had cried lots of tears and whooped with joy and sung my guts and heart out while the music played far too loud. I had hard conversations and ate excellent bites and watched my peonies and roses come to life. And if all goes according to plan and the squirrels play nice, there might be actually be zucchini or two successfully grown by my own hands.

(A first!)

Hell, I TOOK that very call from a stunning boutique hotel room where I was staying for work with my beloved daughter who my client paid to have just down the hall in her OWN chic Manhattan hotel room. The dream, really.

And still.

Flat.

I wondered aloud on that call how much of it was perimenopause. How much was the state of the world. How much was the relentless churn of to-dos and decisions and simply being a human with a nervous system in 2026.

But I kept coming back to AI.

More specifically, to the ways I had been using it. Intentionally and innocuously at first, then unconsciously and with more frequency. A little help here. A little tightening there. A quick meal idea. A structure. A brainstorm. A “can you make this clearer?” when what I may have needed was the discipline to stay with the thing until I knew what I actually meant before it had to tell ME what I meant.

How much have I been outsourcing my thinking?

More than I care to admit.

How critically and analytically have I been reviewing the work it produces?

Less than I care to admit.

I started to notice my typing had become sloppier because I knew autocorrect would catch my slips. Which meant the tools were cleaning up the “mess” before I had the chance to fully feel into the sentence. I noticed the tiny distance growing between me and my own words.

Then I noticed the distance elsewhere.

Leaning into Claude to help me come up with a meal plan or menu, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Useful, even. But I noticed I hadn’t texted Tal for her candied pecan technique. And I didn’t “bother” Peter for his barbecue sauce secrets. And in so doing, was missing the chance to create the opening where a practical question could become a conversation. 

And that conversation could become something else entirely….a scheduled walk, game of euchre or a plan for a hosta swap in the fall.

Because when you ask a person for a recipe, you don’t just the recipe, OBVIOUSLY. You hear what they tried that failed. What their mother always did. What they would never bother with again. What they served it with and where they tasted it for the first time and how the kids love to get involved and did you know that their eldest was moving in with their girlfriend, yes THAT girlfriend? What has been lonely. What has been delicious.

I mean, sure, Claude can generate a meal plan.

But if not careful, I can start accepting the all-inclusive buffet version of my own thinking: abundant, available, technically fine, and strangely stripped of flavour.

Now, I’m not especially interested in arguing about whether AI is good or bad.

In fact, that feels like another flattening into the very binaries I’m trying to argue against.

I use it and will likely continue to use it. There are places where I find it to be genuinely helpful. It can sort the pile, catch repetition, organize the half-thoughts, offer a portal to ideation when the cursor blinks stubbornly. But I am paying closer attention to the places where ease and convenience is costing more than it saves.

Because the thing I’m missing is rarely the answer. It is the friction around the answer.

The twenty seconds before I know what I actually mean. The weird sentence/idea/challenge I keep wrestling because it does not yet know how to behave. The draft that needs to marinate overnight because the truth needs to land before it has any right to be polished into a gleam. 

Admittedly, some of that friction is annoying. But most of it is sacred. 

And generally, I’m finding that’s where taste gets made and honed and developed.

Of course, once I started noticing the flattening in myself, I’ve started noticing it elsewhere.

I find myself skimming people’s work that I used to savour. Closing emails from creators whose words I had once read with a pen in my hand and a charge in my chest.

Spending less time on social platforms, because the AI-generated posts and ads and captions all taste like conference centre pastries.

Technically food. Arranged with care.

And somehow, despite every visible cue, missing butter. And now that I’m spending less time on social media, I’m missing even MORE of the chances to find out what’s happening in my friends’ lives.

At my most cynical, this honestly ALSO feels like the big idea.

Flattening AND disconnection.

That second part hurts my heart more than I care to write about in this moment, so I’m going back to the “bad work” moment. (Because my brain is human and doesn’t always think in useful arcs.)

In many ways, none of this is new.

Sure: AI produces bad work. Bad work has always existed, and some human-made writing has all the life of a beige filing cabinet. The more disorienting thing is how often the work is almost good. Almost useful. Almost moving. Almost specific. Almost brave.

Almost.

And almost has a way of exhausting the palate.

Because now the reader has to do the labour the writer skipped. We have to supply the missing pulse. We have to imagine the actual person beneath the phrasing. We have to decide whether there is an earned idea inside the polished container, or whether we are being handed another tray of technically acceptable strawberries but that taste like they have never once been kissed by the sun.

This is not only an aesthetic problem.

It is a trust problem.

When the language gets too smooth, I stop knowing where the person is. When everything sounds like it has been clarified, optimized, and arranged for my easy consumption, I have to go looking for the seam and the hesitation. You know the one…the sentence with a little dirt under its nails.

A few weeks ago, in a session with artist and megalight Aggie Armstrong, we were talking about the artist’s paradox. On one side, the pressure to make work commercially viable enough that people can access it. On the other, the temptation to make work so cerebral, so protected by its own opacity, that almost no one can.

Pandering on one end. Impenetrability on the other.

At both ends of the spectrum lives a form of disappearance.

One disappears into the market. The other disappears from the people.

What interested me was the space between them.

It reminded me of Lie #3 of the Imposter Complex: You are all or nothing.

The Imposter Complex loves a binary. Complete success or complete failure. Too much or not enough. Pandering or impenetrable.

But the most interesting work rarely lives at either end of said binary..

So we were talking about the spectrum. The colours that live between black and white. The kind of work that can be accessible without becoming flattened, and complex without disappearing from the people it is meant to reach.

It was abstract and think-y and exactly the kind of conversation I live for.

And then Aggie told me something that surprised the hell out of me:

That her favourite colour is Payne’s Gray.

You may not know Aggie (yet), but TRUST me…to know Aggie is to know her as a technicolour dream child. She is saturation. A visual feast of a human. 

Such that gray, even a very elegant gray, was not what I would have expected to hear as her favourite colour.

Then I learned that William Payne originally formulated the colour by mixing Prussian blue, yellow ochre, and crimson lake to add shadow to landscapes.

A gray made from all the primary colours….not just a equal parts black and white…but a gray that remembers brilliant blues and wheaty yellows and moody reds.A shadow that remembers brightness. 

I mean…swoon, right?

That is the nuance I am here for.

That feels increasingly important to me, because so much of what we are being trained toward now is legibility without complexity. Speed without digestion. Output without relationship. Answers without the slow calibration of knowing whether the answer has any flavour.

And maybe that is why the flatness scared me so when I named it on that call.

I didn’t believe that AI was flattening my creativity…but rather that I feeling the way I was complicit in my own sanding down.

To become more efficient and less available. More polished and less particular. More productive and less in conversation with the strange, inconvenient, gorgeous and gritty material of my actual life.

I think this should matter for anyone making anything, frankly. And that is should matter ESPECIALLY to those who are trailblazers building without a template.

When there is no inherited map, the temptation to reach for the nearest available or proximate pattern is understandable. Of course it is. The blank page can be brutal. So can the new offer, the public claim, the book proposal, the keynote, the pivot or the next chapter of a life that no longer fits the old architecture.

A tool that offers shape can feel like mercy.

Sometimes it is.

But if you are doing work that does not yet have a clean precedent, you have to be very careful with borrowed fluency. The first available shape may not be the truest one. The cleanest structure may be the one that strips out the part only you could have known…and that will have your people know you.

Trailblazer work asks for a different kind of attention.

It asks you to notice when the room wants you more legible than alive. When the market rewards the version of your work that can be understood too quickly. When your own fatigue starts negotiating away the friction that might have taken you somewhere more honest and alive.

Like I said: That friction is not always a problem.

Or like Joni said better:

“Give me spots on my apples, But leave me the birds and the bees”

So, for now, I am not leaving AI.

But I am leaving unconsciousness and being vigilant about paying attention to when the tool helps me hear myself more clearly, or when it when it bypasses my ability to hear myself at all.

I am returning to the people who sharpen my palate. The ones who send the recipe with the story. The ones who publish even before the sentence is fully there because we TRUST each other to get there together. The ones who can taste and name the missing butter.

And I am trying to stay with my own work a little longer before I smooth it out.

Because I am not here for a body of work that is abundant, available, technically fine, and missing a pulse. 

I want the strawberry that has been loved into its greatness by the sun.

I want the life that lives in between the binaries, with its peaks and valleys that only flattens when it feels like a rest.

And I suspect you do too.