Mediocrity at Scale: The Real Risk of Working with AI

Private Newsletter

I didn't write this. AI did. Well, I wrote the part after it, just after the second short line. I did this to show how AI can sound so right and still be completely wrong.

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AI didn’t come to take your job.

It came to make everyone worse at theirs.

That’s not a punchline. It’s the real-world outcome of a thousand experiments gone sideways. While the internet debates whether robots will replace graphic designers or junior developers, the truth is playing out in inboxes and Slack channels across every industry: AI is flooding the system with passable work, and making good work harder to see.

The risk isn’t replacement. It’s irrelevance.

And most people won’t even realize it’s happening until it’s already happened to them.

The Confidence Trap

AI doesn’t understand what it’s saying. That’s not new. But what gets lost in the hype is just how persuasive that misunderstanding can be.

You give it a prompt. It gives you a paragraph that sounds right. Not is right—sounds right. It writes with all the confidence of a mediocre consultant who once read a LinkedIn post on the topic. It gets facts wrong. It makes things up. It borrows ideas without attribution. And it delivers all of it with the straight-faced certainty of someone who’s never been challenged in a meeting.

And yet, for a growing number of people in decision-making roles, that’s enough. It’s clean. It’s fast. It doesn’t ask questions. And hey, it saves time.

But speed is not the same as value.

And confidence is not competence.