The AI speed trap, and how to avoid it

A few days ago, my little cousin showed up at my place with a brand-new violin.

She had just done her very first hour, on her own, with a YouTube tutorial. She sat down in front of me, very proud: "Salim, listen, I'm going to play you a song."

She played.

It was a disaster. It screeched, it was out of tune, and the melody was only very, very vaguely recognizable. If she hadn't told me the title, I'd never have guessed.

She stopped and looked at me. Waiting.

I tend to be honest about this kind of thing. So I told her: "Wow. That was a disaster."

She pouted a little. Then I added: "But it's great that you started. One hour is a real beginning. I can't wait to hear what it sounds like in a few months. But right now, no, I don't feel like listening to that."

That's the kind of relationship we have. She didn't take it badly. Quite the opposite: she knows that when she asks for my opinion, she gets a real one. (And she's keeping at it, she's getting better, all good.)

But what she was hoping for that day was a "Wow, after just one hour, that's incredible!"

Except no. If it's bad, the fact that it only took an hour changes nothing. I'm not supposed to be impressed by how fast someone produces something bad.

And that's exactly what's happening with AI right now.

"I built this website in 32 minutes." "I edited this video in 25 minutes." "I wrote 40 LinkedIn posts before lunch."

You look at the result, and honestly: meh. Not great. What impresses is never the result. It's only the stopwatch.

But most of what we do is a competition. Your website is compared with other websites. Your video, with other videos. Your sales proposal, with your competitor's.

Let's take a simple example. You produce 100 Instagram videos in one hour thanks to AI. They're all average. Each one gets 100 views. Total: 10,000 views.

Meanwhile, someone else spends three hours on a single video. A real one, crafted, thought through. It gets a million views.

Who won?

A lot of people reason like this: "One video used to take me an hour, so 100 videos would have taken me 100 hours. I saved 99."

I see it differently: you didn't save 99 hours. You lost an hour making 100 videos that didn't deserve to exist.

Speed is only a virtue if the result is one too.

AI is fantastic for anything that's mechanical execution: formatting, the first draft, research, adapting content that's already good. That's where it should go fast, and that's where it frees you up.

But it doesn't replace what makes the difference in a competition: judgment, taste, choosing what's worth doing. That's the difference between the craftsman and the artist. The machine replaces the first one very well. The second one is you.

So next time you see a "done in 20 minutes with AI," ask yourself just one question: is it any good?

And next time you're the one saying "I did it in 20 minutes," ask yourself the same thing.

If the answer is no, there's nothing to be proud of. There's just a violin to pick up again tomorrow.

Why I wanted to write to you about this

Of all the nuances around AI, I think this is one of the ones that really make a difference. Between people who get a real edge from it, because they know where and how to use it, and people who are simply wasting time, faster than before.

To be clear, this doesn't mean "don't use AI." Quite the opposite. It means: before celebrating that you did something fast, ask yourself whether it was worth doing.

I ask myself that question more and more often. And I'm convinced this is exactly where it all plays out.

Talk soon,

Salim

The Ergon Brief