AI Won’t Steal Your Job. But It Will Steal Your Excuses.

I want to make an unfashionable argument. The AI panic in creative industries is, I think, mostly oriented around the wrong threat. The threat being talked about is job loss. The threat that is actually arriving, and that nobody wants to name out loud, is excuse loss. AI is not, primarily, going to take your job as a working creative. AI is going to take away every excuse you have used for not doing the work you wanted to do, and the missing excuses are going to be louder, and harder to live with, than the missing jobs.

This is a worse problem than the one we are arguing about. It is also a problem the AI-doom discourse cannot help you with, because the doom discourse is structurally focused on external threat, and the actual threat is internal. I’m going to walk through what I mean and then I’m going to suggest the only response that I think actually works.

The excuses we have been using

For the entire history of the working creative life, certain real obstacles have functioned as legitimate explanations for why most creative people do not finish their best work. The obstacles were real. They were also, often, structurally useful for the people carrying them, because the obstacles meant the unfinished work could be defended as not-yet-failed rather than acknowledged as genuinely-not-being-made.

The list of common excuses, in roughly the order they have been used by working creatives:

“I don’t have time.” The time excuse worked when you were employed in a non-creative job for 50 hours a week. AI is collapsing that bottom-tier employment market faster than anyone admits, which means many working creatives are going to have substantially more time over the next five years than they have ever had before. The time excuse will be gone. The work will not arrive on its own.

“I can’t afford the tools.” The tools excuse worked when professional design software cost thousands, when good cameras cost the down payment on a car, when publishing required relationships you didn’t have. AI tools have collapsed the cost of nearly every creative tooling category. You can produce a competent illustrated children’s book on a free Google account this afternoon. The tools excuse is gone. The book will not write itself.

“I’m not skilled enough.” The skill excuse worked when foundational craft (drawing, design, copywriting, basic music production) required years of dedicated study before you could produce something that wasn’t visibly amateur. AI tools now provide a kind of baseline competence prosthetic that lets non-experts produce work in the merely-fine range with very little training. This is, depending on your perspective, either the democratization of creativity or the destruction of craft as a meaningful category. Either way, the skill excuse is harder to use. The work the AI cannot do is now your job and only your job.

“Nobody will read it.” The audience excuse worked when distribution was controlled by gatekeepers (publishers, galleries, A&R departments). The internet started collapsing this excuse twenty years ago; AI distribution tools (newsletter automation, podcast production, video generation) are finishing the collapse. You can reach an audience for almost any kind of work, at zero cost, this week. The audience excuse is gone. The audience does not arrive automatically when the work is mediocre.

“I need a collaborator.” The collaborator excuse worked when certain kinds of work required co-authors (designers needed copywriters, writers needed illustrators, filmmakers needed sound designers). AI tools function, at minimum, as competent collaborators in many of these adjacent disciplines. The collaborator excuse is becoming harder to use. The collaboration was sometimes a real need; it was also sometimes a way of avoiding the responsibility of making a single coherent piece of work that was unambiguously yours.

“I’m waiting for the right idea.” The idea excuse worked when ideas felt scarce, when the writer’s block narrative made it socially acceptable to wait years between projects. AI brainstorming tools have produced an unlimited supply of adequate ideas. The right-idea excuse is gone. The work is not waiting for the perfect concept; the work is waiting for you to commit to executing a good-enough one.

I could continue. The pattern is consistent: excuses that have served working creatives for generations are, one by one, becoming structurally untenable in the AI era. This is not a celebration of the loss. This is a description.

What the excuse loss actually feels like

The lived experience of having your excuses removed is harder than most people anticipate. The excuses were not just rationalizations; they were load-bearing parts of the working creative’s emotional infrastructure. They allowed the unfinished work to remain unfinished without becoming a referendum on the writer’s actual capacity. As long as you could say “I would have done it if I’d had time / money / skill / audience / collaborator / idea,” the work that didn’t get made could be framed as deferred rather than declined.

When the excuses are removed, the unfinished work becomes legible as a choice you made. The choice was to not do the work. The reason was not the absence of the excuse-condition; the reason was, more honestly, that finishing the work was hard, and the hardness was greater than the desire to finish, and the desire to finish was less robust than the writer had been telling themselves it was.

This is, structurally, what most working creatives I know are quietly grappling with right now. AI removed the practical obstacles. The work is now possible in ways it has never been before. The work is also still not getting made, by most working creatives, because the actual obstacle was never the practical condition. The actual obstacle was the much harder problem of sustained attention to a difficult task that nobody is making you do.

The AI didn’t take your job. The AI took away the story you have been telling yourself about why the deeper work has not been made. The story was, in retrospect, the load-bearing thing.

What Miyazaki is actually mad about

Hayao Miyazaki has been famously brutal about AI animation, calling it “an insult to life itself” in 2024. The standard interpretation of his comments is “Miyazaki is anti-technology.” This is wrong. Miyazaki is not anti-technology; he has used CGI and digital tools throughout his career and Studio Ghibli has invested in technical innovation for decades.

What Miyazaki is mad about, if you read his comments closely, is the removal of the labor that makes the work feel earned. Miyazaki believes the meaning of an animated frame is partly produced by the time and skill that went into drawing it. AI animation reproduces the surface of the frame without the underlying labor. To Miyazaki, the labor was not incidental; the labor was the thing that gave the work its specific moral weight.

You can disagree with Miyazaki’s claim philosophically, but you cannot dismiss it as anti-tech. The claim is more interesting than that. The claim is that the human labor of difficult sustained attention is part of what makes art meaningful, and that automating away the labor produces output that is structurally lighter, even when it is visually identical, because the moral weight has been hollowed out.

This connects to the excuse-loss argument. The labor Miyazaki defends is exactly the labor the excuses have allowed working creatives to avoid. The labor is hard. The labor is what produces work that survives. The labor is the part AI cannot do for you and the part you have to do, alone, sober, in sustained attention, over years.

What to actually do

If the diagnosis above lands for you, the response is simple to state and hard to execute. Pick the work you would do if you had no excuses. Do it. Today. With whatever AI tools are useful for the parts of the work that don’t matter (admin, formatting, research synthesis, proof-checking) and without AI tools for the parts that do matter (the specific human attention to specific human material that you alone can give).

This is, in operational terms, one new project that you commit to without the excuse-conditions you have previously required. You don’t have time? Make 30 minutes a day. You don’t have skill? Start anyway. You don’t have audience? Build it as you go. You don’t have collaborator? You don’t need one for this project. You don’t have the right idea? You have a good-enough one, right now, and finishing it is more important than waiting for a better one.

This is the response. It is the response Miyazaki has been giving in his work for fifty years (he sits at the desk, daily, and draws, even in his eighties). It is the response Mary Oliver gave in her poetry practice (she walked, and wrote, and walked, and wrote, until she died at 83). It is the response the working creatives I admire most have, in some version, spent their careers giving. The substances changed. The tools changed. The insistence on doing the work despite the absence of conditions that would justify the work did not change.

That insistence is what AI cannot give you and cannot take from you. It is also the only thing that has ever produced sustained creative output across a working life. The excuses were always the smaller story. The insistence was always the bigger one.

The honest, uncomfortable conclusion

The AI panic in creative industries is, in my opinion, mostly displacement. The thing we are panicking about (job loss) is real but secondary. The thing we are not naming (excuse loss) is more consequential and more personal.

If you are reading this and you are a working creative who has been carrying around a project you have wanted to do for years, you already know what I am pointing at. The excuses you have used have always been partially real and partially convenient. AI is collapsing the partially-real half. The partially-convenient half is what is left, and it is, structurally, a question only you can answer.

The work is the answer. The work is also the question. The AI cannot do either part for you.

Go do the work that matters and stop waiting for the conditions that justify having done it. The conditions are not arriving. The conditions were not the point.

The work is the point. It always was. The excuses were just a long, expensive detour.