Is Your Task the Journey or the Destination?
As a freelancer, you may see AI as a way to increase how many paid projects you can get through in a month as those jobs don’t allow you to stretch your creative muscles anyway. Tight deadlines and fussy clients make creativity in design a luxury, which is why designing for yourself is often a necessary exercise to ensure your paid work continues to be fresh and fast.
As long as you’re maintaining your skills in other ways, you’re not neglecting the ones you rely on. You may even gain a new skill for those jobs that are more about getting it done than challenging yourself creatively.
Stop, Go, Wait
⛔️ The Hard Parts Are The Good Parts
If you want to get better at it, don’t use AI. The critical thinking (and failing) is the progress. When you’re using an AI, you’re not getting better at doing the thing, you’re getting better at using AI. It’s one thing to know what looks good, it’s another to create what looks good and while uncomfortable and time consuming, not getting the answer handed to you is what makes you better at it.
E.g. asking AI to rewrite my blog posts isn’t going to make me a better writer. Asking the AI for feedback or help learning about narrative structure may though…
✅ It’s Got To Get Done
If it’s a skill you don’t need, use AI. If you’re not good at something, never intend to develop that skill, need to get it done, and have no budget to hire someone to do it, then you should use AI.
E.g. creating supplement sketches for my TTRPGs. Drawing is something I would like to get better at, but I’m not at a place in life where I’m going to prioritize developing the skill. The sketches aren’t adding a lot to the game so I’m not going to pay someone to do it either. If by some miracle I ever had the opportunity to sell my sessions as a module, I’d pay someone to do it.
⚠️ Neural Connections Are Like Muscles
You can delegate, but there’s a cost. If you want to get something done fast and it’s one of your core skills, you can use AI, but know that every time you do you’re losing a little bit of the reinforcement that maintains the skill. It may not look any different to you but you can quickly find yourself in the role of manager rather than creative.
E.g. writing for loops has always been something we believed so simple we’d never forget. But after just a few years of using AI auto-complete, devs are already reporting they’re struggling to remember how.