AI Can Hold The Chalk – It Can’t Tell You Where to Make a Mark

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:56:18 GMT

The common complaint I hear about AI is that it’s soulless slop, deprived of humanity, a shell of the human creative spirit. A shadow trying to emulate the body on which the light is cast. They point to the uninspired images with too many fingers, the "it's not just X, it's Y" grammatical droning, the sycophantic tone, and the — GOD FORBID — now demonized em-dash. A point of personal pain for me, as someone who loved the thing. If you don't believe me, just look; I'm the kind of guy to use a semicolon. And to be honest, I’m sick of it. I’ve heard enough, from every possible point of view, from those informed and uninformed, early adopters and luddites, and they’re all completely, absolutely, unequivocally right.

I now do this for a living. I put a lot of time and passion into this technology because I find it fascinating and inspiring. And that’s exactly why I’m so exhausted by this conversation. The sentiment, the findings, and the visceral personal reactions are all undeniably correct, but the conclusions that are drawn from these observations are, in my humble human opinion, wrong.

Hacks are hacks. There have always been hacks, and there forever will be hacks. This slop isn’t new; lazy writing is not novel. In a past life I worked as a creative, mostly in film and video, and my partner at Hewn is an accomplished Creative Director with a number of awards including a Bronze Lion at Cannes. If there is something we can both attest to, it’s that there has always been someone cheaper, lazier, and less qualified poisoning the ears of prospective clients. “Why would I pay you that for a logo? My nephew is fantastic at Photoshop!” is the sort of question we’ve all had to patiently field. In our lifetimes an entire gig economy popped up to homogenize and commoditize the work that we passionately put our “10,000 hours” into, only to sell an uninspired approximation for $5. An endless stream of derivative, good-enough work put out by people competing on price and speed alone. AI didn’t invent the hack; it’s simply the latest sleight-of-hand trick employed by a cadre of grifters.

So, if your conclusion is that AI produces work without purpose, without deeper meaning or thoughtfulness, I’d politely argue that such work has always existed. The question we should be asking is “what are the aspects of our work that AI is unable to touch?” What makes us uniquely human, and how do we place that stamp on what we do?

There’s an old story about Charles Steinmetz, the engineer who all but built General Electric’s early electrical systems. As the story goes, Henry Ford had a massive generator that no one could fix, so he called Steinmetz in. Steinmetz looked it over, listened to it, and made a single chalk mark on the housing. “Replace the windings there,” he said. It worked. Then he sent a bill for ten thousand dollars.

Ford balked. Ten thousand dollars for a chalk mark? He demanded an itemized invoice. Steinmetz wrote back: “Making one chalk mark: one dollar. Knowing where to make it: nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”

None of this is about knowing how to make a mark with a piece of chalk. It’s about the countless hours, decades of dedication, and honest-to-god love for what we do that it takes to know where to place it. And knowing is exactly the part AI can’t do for you. It can draft the email; it can’t tell you that this particular client needs reassurance, not information. It can generate ten logos; it can’t know which one will survive being printed small on the side of a truck. The judgment, the taste, the ability to read the room — the things you spent your career developing and perfecting — none of that is on the table.

And this is what I desperately want to impart on every conversation I overhear from skeptics and those fearful:

AI doesn’t threaten the craftsman. It threatens the hack.

If that’s you, run for the hills. If your existence was to distill and sum the averages of the more creative souls that surround you, you will not be missed. You should be scared. Skynet is coming for you. But if instead you take pride and joy in what you do, if you take pleasure in taking the rough idea and hewing it into a bespoke piece using the craft you honed over countless hours, you should celebrate this technology. It is freedom. It lets you return to the parts of existence that are beautifully and uniquely human.

To be grandiose: we as humans are not made better by replying to the dozens of slight variations of the same email day-in-day-out, or by entering data in triplicate into different spreadsheets because our departments can’t agree on a shared format. Nobody I am aware of has spent hours of their life studying the craft of busywork. And while you are stuck doing these things, consumed with the mundane, there is a client who desperately needs your qualified insight, or simply reaffirmation of the decisions they know are right but need another person to assure them of. Hand the busywork to the machine, and what’s left isn’t less of you. It’s more.

This isn’t pie-in-the-sky, ivory tower posturing. I’ve come to this conclusion because of how I’ve seen this technology impact people around me in a real way. Indulge me, if you will, in a final anecdote:

Kevin, my aforementioned partner at Hewn, recently took his family on vacation for a week. When he returned, he was faced with a feeling familiar to all of us. An inbox that’s been piling high, a calendar packed with the deferred obligations from his time off, and the just, well, sort of existential dread of coming home from a dream and facing the reality that was left waiting. Except this time the workload was lessened, and the dread was shooed off with a reassuring confidence in the tools we put in place. In the background, the soulless elegance of this technology chugged away and triaged his inbox by creating drafts of suggested responses for him to review. It had handled the recurring invoicing and time-keeping entries that would have otherwise consumed hours of his day. It produced a daily brief for him that broke down what he had missed and what remained to be done. And, most importantly, during this time, he was playing Pokémon with his six-year-old son.

I think about that example a lot because it encapsulates all of this in one simple snapshot. AI didn’t take Kevin’s job. It didn’t strip his work of the stamp he takes pride in placing on everything he does. It did the dishes. The mundane chores we’re all faced with but loathe to address. And in doing so it allowed him to celebrate what makes us human. Some of that regained time went into his work. Some of it allowed him to spend time with his son, while his son is still young.

So here’s the honest, un-hyped case for this technology, from someone genuinely not trying to sell you magic: most of the AI noise you hear is hype, and a lot of what gets made with it is junk. All true. But in the hands of someone who knows their craft, AI isn’t a threat to the human parts of the work. It’s the thing that finally clears space for them.

I am not naïve to the fact that this technology can be used by hacks and, worse yet, be used to allow those hacks to promote themselves. But I truly, genuinely, personally believe that the potential for good is greater. The companies worth working for, and the careers worth pursuing, will be the ones who embrace this technology and celebrate people by making them more valuable, not disposable as the critics would have you fear.

The goal was never to do more, faster. It’s to spend your finite hours on what’s uniquely yours — the work only you can do, and the life outside of it that’s the whole reason you work in the first place.

It was never about the chalk. It was about knowing where to place it.

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AI Can Hold The Chalk – It Can’t Tell You Where to Make a Mark