Dec 10, 2025
Why We're Proudly Pro-Human
[ or what some might call "Anti-AI" ]
[ or what some might call "Anti-AI" ]
A Foreword of Self-Awareness: For brevity, I'm simplifying and/or truncating my thoughts in many parts of this discussion. I fully expect not to have the most accurate, articulate, or detailed explanations or definitions on the topic compared to many who may read this. So, if you'd like to discuss further (or correct me), feel free to reach out. I want to be as accurate as possible while maintaining the integrity of the ever-self-important blogging format.
__________
It's a no-brainer for me. People make really cool stuff. They do it well. They share themselves, their experiences, and their gifts through their creations. Humans have done this for as long as humans have existed (like, we're STILL excited about experiencing cave paintings, for crying out loud). The diversity of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs...and how those are shared through human-made works, art, and creativity? It really is magical and essential to the human experience. So when I get told for the thousandth time that machines (which are a human creation, btw) are the way forward and the future of human excellence... my face starts morphing into a GIF of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.
I could spend literal days of my life typing out my attempts at explaining the nuances of my thoughts and feelings about the zeitgeist that is Sam, Elon, and Zuck's fever-dream love child. I could spend several more explaining my experience as an artist, creative professional, and designer, and how each of those backgrounds informs my opinions and feelings on the current state of creativity as it relates to AI. But who are we kidding? This is a blog, and there's a word counter at the top. 203 words...205, 206...
Defining the Status Quo
At some point, the details become a distraction from the actual thesis. To simplify my thoughts enough for us to have a basic premise to work from together, here's a very brief list of parts and pieces that frame my views to (hopefully) help you understand why I, and ABLE Concepts, will always be a "People first, everything else second" type of business:
I'm not actually anti-AI (sorry for the potential rage bait title). I am very anti- the current state of generative AI (genAI) platforms.
I AM incredibly pro- people and their creative works. Humans are incredible, and what we've accomplished as a species (including creating AI stuff!) is mind-blowing.
For the record, I think we can agree that the "AI" a majority of the public is using or talking about is one (or many) of the genAI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Anthropic, MidJourney, et al.
The other types/layers of artificial intelligence (such as machine or deep learning, or using Grammarly right now to check my sentence structure) have a lot of promise, but haven't been actualized or proliferated in the same way as genAI.
For a multitude of reasons, I believe genAI platforms (and the companies pushing their genAI solutions) are a massive net-negative for humanity. More on this below.
For the remainder of this blog, I'll strictly stick to the discussion surrounding genAI. Worth noting: I'm more intrigued by other real-world applications of AI, but don't feel like we have enough public use cases to speak broadly about them.
The Multitude of Reasons
I've been sitting here for quite some time trying to figure out how to edit my 'multitude of reasons' down to a workable amount of words, and...it might be impossible? So I'm pivoting! I want to save you and me some time and energy, and I don't want this to feel overwrought or heavy-handed. Efficiency is key in the AI world, after all!
…which means I'm going to do the exact thing you'd NOT expect me to do: Ask ChatGPT what it thinks.
I asked it: "Why do so many people believe you're more valuable than other humans?"
A Foreword of Self-Awareness: For brevity, I'm simplifying and/or truncating my thoughts in many parts of this discussion. I fully expect not to have the most accurate, articulate, or detailed explanations or definitions on the topic compared to many who may read this. So, if you'd like to discuss further (or correct me), feel free to reach out. I want to be as accurate as possible while maintaining the integrity of the ever-self-important blogging format.
__________
It's a no-brainer for me. People make really cool stuff. They do it well. They share themselves, their experiences, and their gifts through their creations. Humans have done this for as long as humans have existed (like, we're STILL excited about experiencing cave paintings, for crying out loud). The diversity of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs...and how those are shared through human-made works, art, and creativity? It really is magical and essential to the human experience. So when I get told for the thousandth time that machines (which are a human creation, btw) are the way forward and the future of human excellence... my face starts morphing into a GIF of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.
I could spend literal days of my life typing out my attempts at explaining the nuances of my thoughts and feelings about the zeitgeist that is Sam, Elon, and Zuck's fever-dream love child. I could spend several more explaining my experience as an artist, creative professional, and designer, and how each of those backgrounds informs my opinions and feelings on the current state of creativity as it relates to AI. But who are we kidding? This is a blog, and there's a word counter at the top. 203 words...205, 206...
Defining the Status Quo
At some point, the details become a distraction from the actual thesis. To simplify my thoughts enough for us to have a basic premise to work from together, here's a very brief list of parts and pieces that frame my views to (hopefully) help you understand why I, and ABLE Concepts, will always be a "People first, everything else second" type of business:
I'm not actually anti-AI (sorry for the potential rage bait title). I am very anti- the current state of generative AI (genAI) platforms.
I AM incredibly pro- people and their creative works. Humans are incredible, and what we've accomplished as a species (including creating AI stuff!) is mind-blowing.
For the record, I think we can agree that the "AI" a majority of the public is using or talking about is one (or many) of the genAI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Anthropic, MidJourney, et al.
The other types/layers of artificial intelligence (such as machine or deep learning, or using Grammarly right now to check my sentence structure) have a lot of promise, but haven't been actualized or proliferated in the same way as genAI.
For a multitude of reasons, I believe genAI platforms (and the companies pushing their genAI solutions) are a massive net-negative for humanity. More on this below.
For the remainder of this blog, I'll strictly stick to the discussion surrounding genAI. Worth noting: I'm more intrigued by other real-world applications of AI, but don't feel like we have enough public use cases to speak broadly about them.
The Multitude of Reasons
I've been sitting here for quite some time trying to figure out how to edit my 'multitude of reasons' down to a workable amount of words, and...it might be impossible? So I'm pivoting! I want to save you and me some time and energy, and I don't want this to feel overwrought or heavy-handed. Efficiency is key in the AI world, after all!
…which means I'm going to do the exact thing you'd NOT expect me to do: Ask ChatGPT what it thinks.
I asked it: "Why do so many people believe you're more valuable than other humans?"
It returned:
"Some people talk about AI systems like me as if we're “more valuable” than humans, but that belief usually comes from misunderstanding what AI is—and from overvaluing certain kinds of abilities (speed, memory, pattern-matching) while undervaluing human qualities."
Hey, don't look at me. I'm just quoting ChatGPT's answer! You can find the entire chat script here, but I'm including a few of my favorite snippets below (emphases added):
"AI can feel superhuman in narrow tasks – I can answer questions instantly, recall vast amounts of information, and generate text or code quickly. To some people, this looks like intelligence that surpasses human ability.
But these are narrow, mechanical advantages—not true understanding, consciousness, or judgment."
"Anthropomorphism – Humans have a deep tendency to treat anything that talks like a person as if it were a person. That leads some to assume emotional depth where there is none, project moral status where it doesn't apply, and forget that AI lacks experience, consciousness, or suffering.
This is a psychological illusion—not a real attribute of AI."
"Tech hype and marketing –
Companies have incentives to frame AI as revolutionary, transformative, or "superhuman."This can inflate public perception until some people start believing AI has agency, desires, and superiority when in reality, AI is trained on patterns, not an independent mind."
"Humans sometimes devalue themselves –
In moments of frustration with society, other people, or themselves, some start thinking, "Humans are destructive," "AI might do better," or "Maybe we should step aside."These expressions come from disillusionment, not from any fact about AI's worth."
ChatGPT also provided this rather poignant summary (emphasis added in red)
No matter how capable Al becomes, it does not have moral worth, consciousness, experience, or subjective existence. Humans feel pleasure and pain, form relationships, have autonomy and rights, and create meaning. Al does none of these.
So the belief that I could be "more valuable" than a human is based on confusion, projection, or cultural pressure, not reality.
Look, if you're a fan of what genAI is doing and use ChatGPT, or Claude, or whatever for ideas, advice, or feedback... It's reasonable to accept what it says about itself above, right? And, if you're more aligned with the anti-AI crowd, ChatGPT's answers above might affirm some of the feelings you may already have about it. Don't shoot the messenger...I'm simply here to share its well-patterned prompt returns about itself. Fascinating.
Magic tricks check off a bunch of fun boxes
I've shared my opinions about genAI extensively online, and what I've learned is that most of my beliefs distill down to a simple premise: Generative AI, as it exists right now, is like a really incredible magic trick.
With magic, you get:
A "wow" factor – it separates reality from wonder
Sleight of hand – we're impressed by performative skill
The chance to challenge reality – the impossible appears probable
Some psychological benefit – fun, puzzling scenarios trigger our fascinations
Magic also creates an interesting dichotomy: the closer one is to understanding the illusion, the less impressive the tricks are. Conversely, the less we try to pick apart the secrets, the easier it becomes to misdirect, so the trick feels more real. This is why the creative outputs of genAI platforms seem so incredible to non-artists and non-creative professionals. It's also why someone proficient in code can immediately see the flaws in genAI-generated code, or why an Excel pro can spot issues with AI-generated macros and equations. It's just a stellar magic trick... giving many people around the world the illusion that it's as valuable as, or even more helpful than, their human counterparts.
This is where I differ; where I'm more counter-cultural.
I love magic, but I also understand it's not real. As an artist and creative director, my goal has always been to create work reflective of my very real, very genuine human experience. And what I want right now in this time and space is a whole lot more real and a lot less synthetic. And we need a hell of a lot more real right now in the world. Real people. Real work. Real art. Real life. What's so cool about people is that you get...all of this, every single time. We are creations who create.
That's why I'm leading ABLE Concepts from a Pro-Human, Pro-Creator place. I intend to welcome healthy, happy, challenging dialogue, but the ABLE Concepts guarantee is that human work will always be prioritized over AI-assisted work.
— Nick (human)
Ways to get involved/better resourced
There are incredibly talented people around the world whose work focuses on the prominence and provenance of human-made works, ideas, and discussions.
Human Creator (from the Human Intelligence® team) – "Get certified as a genuine Human Creator. Your lifetime certification opens access to an evolving set of tools designed to protect Creators."
Anthromade – "Our badge provides a new way to help the world instantly spot real, human-made work and verify who created it. Join a growing community of humans still being human - launching early 2026."
Glaze (from a team at the Sand Lab, Univ. of Chicago) – "Glaze is a system designed to protect human artists by disrupting style mimicry. At a high level, Glaze works by understanding the AI models that are training on human art, and using machine learning algorithms, computing a set of minimal changes to artworks, such that it appears unchanged to human eyes, but appears to AI models like a dramatically different art style."
Nightshade (same team as Glaze above) – "Nightshade works similarly as Glaze, but instead of a defense against style mimicry, it is designed as an offense tool to distort feature representations inside generative AI image models. Like Glaze, Nightshade is computed as a multi-objective optimization that minimizes visible changes to the original image. While human eyes see a shaded image that is largely unchanged from the original, the AI model sees a dramatically different composition in the image."
People first, everything else after.
The conversation surrounding Artificial Intelligence – its categories, ethical angles, and everyone's philosophical leanings – is complex, to say the least. It's too important a topic to let that overwhelm or detract us from engaging thoughtfully, however.
Let's not be afraid to get into it and share our thoughts and ideas. I'm available any time for a chat. You and I are worth figuring this out together.
Ps. – if you'd like to learn more about Anthromade specifically, please get in touch with me and let's chat about getting you involved.
Read Next...
Dec 10, 2025
Why We're Proudly Pro-Human
[ or what some might call "Anti-AI" ]
A Foreword of Self-Awareness: For brevity, I'm simplifying and/or truncating my thoughts in many parts of this discussion. I fully expect not to have the most accurate, articulate, or detailed explanations or definitions on the topic compared to many who may read this. So, if you'd like to discuss further (or correct me), feel free to reach out. I want to be as accurate as possible while maintaining the integrity of the ever-self-important blogging format.
__________
It's a no-brainer for me. People make really cool stuff. They do it well. They share themselves, their experiences, and their gifts through their creations. Humans have done this for as long as humans have existed (like, we're STILL excited about experiencing cave paintings, for crying out loud). The diversity of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs...and how those are shared through human-made works, art, and creativity? It really is magical and essential to the human experience. So when I get told for the thousandth time that machines (which are a human creation, btw) are the way forward and the future of human excellence... my face starts morphing into a GIF of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.
I could spend literal days of my life typing out my attempts at explaining the nuances of my thoughts and feelings about the zeitgeist that is Sam, Elon, and Zuck's fever-dream love child. I could spend several more explaining my experience as an artist, creative professional, and designer, and how each of those backgrounds informs my opinions and feelings on the current state of creativity as it relates to AI. But who are we kidding? This is a blog, and there's a word counter at the top. 203 words...205, 206...
Defining the Status Quo
At some point, the details become a distraction from the actual thesis. To simplify my thoughts enough for us to have a basic premise to work from together, here's a very brief list of parts and pieces that frame my views to (hopefully) help you understand why I, and ABLE Concepts, will always be a "People first, everything else second" type of business:
I'm not actually anti-AI (sorry for the potential rage bait title). I am very anti- the current state of generative AI (genAI) platforms.
I AM incredibly pro- people and their creative works. Humans are incredible, and what we've accomplished as a species (including creating AI stuff!) is mind-blowing.
For the record, I think we can agree that the "AI" a majority of the public is using or talking about is one (or many) of the genAI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Anthropic, MidJourney, et al.
The other types/layers of artificial intelligence (such as machine or deep learning, or using Grammarly right now to check my sentence structure) have a lot of promise, but haven't been actualized or proliferated in the same way as genAI.
For a multitude of reasons, I believe genAI platforms (and the companies pushing their genAI solutions) are a massive net-negative for humanity. More on this below.
For the remainder of this blog, I'll strictly stick to the discussion surrounding genAI. Worth noting: I'm more intrigued by other real-world applications of AI, but don't feel like we have enough public use cases to speak broadly about them.
The Multitude of Reasons
I've been sitting here for quite some time trying to figure out how to edit my 'multitude of reasons' down to a workable amount of words, and...it might be impossible? So I'm pivoting! I want to save you and me some time and energy, and I don't want this to feel overwrought or heavy-handed. Efficiency is key in the AI world, after all!
…which means I'm going to do the exact thing you'd NOT expect me to do: Ask ChatGPT what it thinks.
I asked it: "Why do so many people believe you're more valuable than other humans?"
It returned:
"Some people talk about AI systems like me as if we're “more valuable” than humans, but that belief usually comes from misunderstanding what AI is—and from overvaluing certain kinds of abilities (speed, memory, pattern-matching) while undervaluing human qualities."
Hey, don't look at me. I'm just quoting ChatGPT's answer! You can find the entire chat script here, but I'm including a few of my favorite snippets below (emphases added):
"AI can feel superhuman in narrow tasks – I can answer questions instantly, recall vast amounts of information, and generate text or code quickly. To some people, this looks like intelligence that surpasses human ability.
But these are narrow, mechanical advantages—not true understanding, consciousness, or judgment."
"Anthropomorphism – Humans have a deep tendency to treat anything that talks like a person as if it were a person. That leads some to assume emotional depth where there is none, project moral status where it doesn't apply, and forget that AI lacks experience, consciousness, or suffering.
This is a psychological illusion—not a real attribute of AI."
"Tech hype and marketing –
Companies have incentives to frame AI as revolutionary, transformative, or "superhuman."This can inflate public perception until some people start believing AI has agency, desires, and superiority when in reality, AI is trained on patterns, not an independent mind."
"Humans sometimes devalue themselves –
In moments of frustration with society, other people, or themselves, some start thinking, "Humans are destructive," "AI might do better," or "Maybe we should step aside."These expressions come from disillusionment, not from any fact about AI's worth."
ChatGPT also provided this rather poignant summary (emphasis added in red)
No matter how capable Al becomes, it does not have moral worth, consciousness, experience, or subjective existence. Humans feel pleasure and pain, form relationships, have autonomy and rights, and create meaning. Al does none of these.
So the belief that I could be "more valuable" than a human is based on confusion, projection, or cultural pressure, not reality.
Look, if you're a fan of what genAI is doing and use ChatGPT, or Claude, or whatever for ideas, advice, or feedback... It's reasonable to accept what it says about itself above, right? And, if you're more aligned with the anti-AI crowd, ChatGPT's answers above might affirm some of the feelings you may already have about it. Don't shoot the messenger...I'm simply here to share its well-patterned prompt returns about itself. Fascinating.
Magic tricks check off a bunch of fun boxes
I've shared my opinions about genAI extensively online, and what I've learned is that most of my beliefs distill down to a simple premise: Generative AI, as it exists right now, is like a really incredible magic trick.
With magic, you get:
A "wow" factor – it separates reality from wonder
Sleight of hand – we're impressed by performative skill
The chance to challenge reality – the impossible appears probable
Some psychological benefit – fun, puzzling scenarios trigger our fascinations
Magic also creates an interesting dichotomy: the closer one is to understanding the illusion, the less impressive the tricks are. Conversely, the less we try to pick apart the secrets, the easier it becomes to misdirect, so the trick feels more real. This is why the creative outputs of genAI platforms seem so incredible to non-artists and non-creative professionals. It's also why someone proficient in code can immediately see the flaws in genAI-generated code, or why an Excel pro can spot issues with AI-generated macros and equations. It's just a stellar magic trick... giving many people around the world the illusion that it's as valuable as, or even more helpful than, their human counterparts.
This is where I differ; where I'm more counter-cultural.
I love magic, but I also understand it's not real. As an artist and creative director, my goal has always been to create work reflective of my very real, very genuine human experience. And what I want right now in this time and space is a whole lot more real and a lot less synthetic. And we need a hell of a lot more real right now in the world. Real people. Real work. Real art. Real life. What's so cool about people is that you get...all of this, every single time. We are creations who create.
That's why I'm leading ABLE Concepts from a Pro-Human, Pro-Creator place. I intend to welcome healthy, happy, challenging dialogue, but the ABLE Concepts guarantee is that human work will always be prioritized over AI-assisted work.
— Nick (human)
Ways to get involved/better resourced
There are incredibly talented people around the world whose work focuses on the prominence and provenance of human-made works, ideas, and discussions.
Human Creator (from the Human Intelligence® team) – "Get certified as a genuine Human Creator. Your lifetime certification opens access to an evolving set of tools designed to protect Creators."
Anthromade – "Our badge provides a new way to help the world instantly spot real, human-made work and verify who created it. Join a growing community of humans still being human - launching early 2026."
Glaze (from a team at the Sand Lab, Univ. of Chicago) – "Glaze is a system designed to protect human artists by disrupting style mimicry. At a high level, Glaze works by understanding the AI models that are training on human art, and using machine learning algorithms, computing a set of minimal changes to artworks, such that it appears unchanged to human eyes, but appears to AI models like a dramatically different art style."
Nightshade (same team as Glaze above) – "Nightshade works similarly as Glaze, but instead of a defense against style mimicry, it is designed as an offense tool to distort feature representations inside generative AI image models. Like Glaze, Nightshade is computed as a multi-objective optimization that minimizes visible changes to the original image. While human eyes see a shaded image that is largely unchanged from the original, the AI model sees a dramatically different composition in the image."
People first, everything else after.
The conversation surrounding Artificial Intelligence – its categories, ethical angles, and everyone's philosophical leanings – is complex, to say the least. It's too important a topic to let that overwhelm or detract us from engaging thoughtfully, however.
Let's not be afraid to get into it and share our thoughts and ideas. I'm available any time for a chat. You and I are worth figuring this out together.
Ps. – if you'd like to learn more about Anthromade specifically, please get in touch with me and let's chat about getting you involved.