I was scrolling through a Facebook group recently for a band I follow. Someone posted that the band had released a digital announcement about some upcoming shows, and people in the comments had noticed the artwork looked like it was generated by AI.
Within a few hours, there were dozens of upset fans in the thread.
“How could they do this?”
“It’s not authentic.”
“It’s cheating.”
And I thought: here we go again.
I want to ask you something. Is it cheating when an accountant uses a spreadsheet? Is it cheating when an architect uses computer-aided design software? When a high school student uses a calculator? When a college student references Wikipedia? When a film director uses CGI?
Most of us would say no to all of those. They’re just tools. They’re normal. Nobody bats an eye.
But I want to tell you something interesting. When those tools were first introduced, a lot of people said exactly what those band fans were saying.
“It’s cutting corners.”
“It’s not real work.”
“It’s unethical.”
I actually experienced this firsthand. When I was getting my business degree, I had an accounting professor who made us do manual general ledgers. By hand. With a pencil.
He was completely opposed to spreadsheets. In his view, using one was unprofessional and dishonest. He felt that if you weren’t doing the work manually, you weren’t really doing the work at all.
Today, we wouldn’t hire an accountant who didn’t use technology. The idea that spreadsheets are “cheating” sounds almost absurd now. But it felt real and important to a lot of people at the time.
We are in that same moment with AI.
The discomfort is real. The backlash is loud. And in five years, it’s going to look a lot like the spreadsheet debate looks today.
Here’s the thing: no technology has ever been the answer by itself.
A spreadsheet doesn’t make you a good accountant. CAD software doesn’t make you a talented architect. And AI is not going to make you a better recruiter or salesperson all on its own. What these tools do is take the work that has to happen anyway and make it faster, more scalable, and more consistent. They free you up to focus on the parts of your job that actually require your judgment, your relationships, your expertise.
That’s not cheating. That’s working smarter.
The professionals in our industry who are going to struggle are not the ones who use AI. They’re the ones who spend the next two years in the spreadsheet debate while their competitors are already figuring out how to work at scale.
AI is a mainstream tool.
It already is, and it’s only getting more embedded in everything we do.
The question isn’t whether to use it. The question is whether you’re going to be someone who uses it well.
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