What AI Can Do—and What It Can't Do—for You

Everyone's selling you magic again. This time, it's artificial intelligence.

It'll write your emails, design your logo, ace your homework, even help you "find your voice"—whatever that means. The promise is seductive: unlimited creativity on demand, superhuman productivity, effortless insight. Just type what you want. The machine delivers.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: AI can make you a better and more efficient version of who you already are. That's both the promise and the peril.

AI Won't Make You Smart or Creative or Thoughtful. It'll Make You More You.

If you're thoughtful, curious, and disciplined, AI can be astonishing. It can help you write faster, iterate ideas, visualize concepts, and automate the stuff that used to bog you down. In the hands of someone already formed, it's a powerful amplifier.

But if you're lazy, shallow, or unsure of your own taste? AI will just feed that back to you—faster, slicker, and more confidently wrong.

Ask it to write an article, and it will give you five—none of which you'll know how to improve if you've never learned how to revise. Ask it for a logo, and it'll generate a hundred—none of which will feel right if you've never trained your eye to see what's good. You'll find yourself scrolling through endless variations, unable to articulate why none of them work.

That's the thing about AI: it doesn't know what beauty is. You do—or you don't.

Have You Ever Taken a Painting Class? A Writing Workshop? Read a Poem Slowly, Twice?

Asking AI to create without having any creative foundation yourself is like commissioning a sculpture when you've never seen a statue. You don't know how to describe what you want. You don't know how to judge what's good.

The people getting the most out of generative AI aren't the ones yelling "enhance" into a prompt box. They're the ones who already studied and thought about composition, narrative, tone, light, pacing. They've done the work. They've developed taste. They know what to ask for—and more importantly, what to reject.

You can't prompt your way to discernment. You have to know what you're looking for and whether something matches that or doesn't.

There's Still a Lot to Be Said for the Liberal Arts

Yes, the AI can summarize a Shakespeare play. But it can't feel Lear's madness, or Hamlet's paralysis, or Cordelia's silence. It can't hear the subtext. It doesn't grapple with meaning.

A real education—especially in the humanities—is slow. It teaches judgment. Taste. Empathy. Nuance. It doesn't make you fast; it makes you deep. And depth is exactly what AI lacks.

With no depth or breadth of experience and knowledge, the result from AI is output. But nothing that grabs your insides.

Software Has Beauty Too—And AI Won't Architect It for You

This isn't just about art and literature. Software development has its own aesthetics—elegant architectures, clean abstractions, systems that scale gracefully under pressure. AI can generate code, sure. But it won't design a truly good architecture to solve a complex real-world problem without you guiding it and making many decisions.

It can help you set up testing and continuous integration, but it won't even think to do these things unless you know to ask for them—and then it still won't do them the way you need them done. It can help you refactor code, but you have to direct it properly, watch what it's doing, and course-correct when it goes astray.

You have to be the lead. The AI is just a very fast junior developer who never gets tired—but also never learns to think strategically about the problem you're really trying to solve.

But here's where AI truly shines in software: it's simultaneously versed in thousands of techniques, libraries, and frameworks you could never master in a lifetime. If you understand the underlying concepts—if you know what you need even if you don't know how to implement it exactly or quickly—AI can pull from libraries you've heard or never heard of but would need weeks to learn effectively. It knows the latest syntax changes, the common pitfalls, the best practices you'd have to discover through long study or painful trial and error.

Without experience building systems, debugging disasters, and learning what maintainable code actually looks like, you'll end up with something that works today and breaks tomorrow. The beauty of good software—like the beauty of good art—comes from understanding that goes deeper than syntax.

Build Beauty From Within—Then Let AI Reflect It

If you want to do something worthwhile with AI, start by becoming someone worth reflecting.

AI favors those who have something within of value. If you're operating only on the surface—if all you bring is what AI can already do better and faster—then you have no role to play. The machine will replace you because there's nothing uniquely yours to amplify.

If you settle for mediocre work from yourself, then you will not demand more from AI. Bach said: "I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results." He did not just mean putting in a lot of hours; anyone can do that.

Take the art class. Read the hard book. Rewrite the same sentence ten times until it stops making you cringe. Climb out of your comfort zone and learn something you're not good at. Because that's where real growth lives—not in instant output, but in long-term formation.

AI is not your mind. It's not your conscience. It's not your taste.

It's a mirror. It's a brush. It's a tool.

The real magic—the kind that's always mattered—isn't in the tool. It never was. The magic happens in the years spent learning to see, to judge, to create with intention. It's in the slow accumulation of taste, the patient development of skill, the courage to fail and try again.

AI can amplify that magic, but it can't create it. If you don't have something worth expressing in the first place, all the artificial intelligence in the world will just hand you back a shinier version of nothing.