I think social media makes AI sound much more complicated than it is to use.
Every time I open a feed, there's another framework, another tool, another thing I apparently need to understand before I can get started.
Some of that information is useful, but a lot of it leaves me feeling further behind than I was before I read it.
There's an incentive to make it sound bigger
There are reasons for that. Someone is selling a course, yet another their implementation program.
Making the starting point sound simple doesn't give people much reason to pay for help getting there.
I don't think everyone is doing this deliberately, but there's an incentive to make the subject feel bigger.
Using it is easy to begin with
And using AI is fairly easy to begin with.
You can ask it to explain what to do next. You can describe what you're trying to achieve in ordinary language and work from there.
There's complexity as you go deeper, as there is with any skill. You still need judgment, and you need to check what it gives you. But I think the amount you need to learn before doing something useful gets exaggerated.
Ask for help putting together a business plan and you can get a starting point quickly. It will have gaps and assumptions, but there's something there to work with.
Research on professional writing tasks has already shown that AI can help people produce work faster, although that says little about whether a business will succeed.
The hard part starts after the plan
The difficult part comes when you have to do something with the plan. Getting a client might take a month of trying, following up, hearing nothing, and adjusting.
You can put in real effort and have very little to show for it that evening.
Consuming something gives you a much quicker sense of satisfaction, and there's always something else ready to watch.
I do worry that we're getting more accustomed to that immediate reward and less willing to sit through work whose result is uncertain.
Ideas are cheap now
AI makes generating ideas and plans cheap. I can see how that becomes another place to stay busy without moving very far.
You can keep asking for a better version, exploring a different direction, or finding another tool. Each answer gives you something new to consider, while the uncomfortable part keeps waiting.
There is research suggesting that reducing constant access to the internet can help attention. One experiment found improvements after blocking mobile internet for two weeks. That doesn't prove my whole argument, but it gives me reason to take the distraction seriously.
Why AI content makes AI harder for me
For me, this is particularly true of content about AI. Information doesn't just pass through me. I internalize it, and another person's method becomes something I feel I should consider.
Enough of that makes a fairly simple task feel crowded with possibilities.
That's why I think consuming AI content can actually make using AI harder for someone like me. I'd rather open the tool, work on something, and look things up when I get stuck.
Following through is the scarce part
My bet is that following through will become more valuable as help becomes easier to get.
I'm less convinced that access to all these tools will make everyone more productive. There's still a person who has to stay with the work after the excitement wears off.
Personally, I'd like fewer things in my head when I sit down to do it.