Artificial intelligence might be the only thing that Americans hate and/or fear as much as one another. Fun fact: According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, 55 percent of Americans believe AI—the technology that is supposed to cure cancer and usher in a 20-hour workweek—will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives. (Democrats and Republicans had a 56 percent and 55 percent unfavorable rating, respectively, in a March CNN survey.) And yet, like SSRIs, credit scores, social media, minoxidil, and GLP-1s, AI has crept into more corners of society than you could possibly imagine. It’s baked into processes you already use, priced into things you buy, and—despite whatever moral or ethical objections to AI that you’ve got—secretly being deployed by people you know and (think) you respect.
So, so many more people are using AI than are willing to say as much. Talking to creative professionals for this story, I encountered some of the most intense paranoia and vitriol of my journalism career. Even people who hate AI wouldn’t go on the record, out of the fear they’d seem technophobic.
Welcome to our present moment with AI: early, weird, uncomfortable, inescapable, freaky. It’s laden with potential and comically ripe for grifters. Nobody can predict whether, a year from now, the boosters and skeptics among us will be seen as daft rubes or deft early adopters, heroic holdouts or hopeless Luddites. Anyone who claims to know what’s coming has given you a decent indicator that they’re probably not worth listening to. That, maybe, is the first thing to know.
The second thing to know is hard-won from my years of overseeing AI coverage as the editor in chief of Futurism: Every time you read a news headline about “artificial intelligence,” substitute the word computing. AI is a powerful technology, but fundamentally—literally!—that’s all it is: an advanced form of computing. AI has the most sophisticated processing of inputs and outputs (what people are calling “behaviors”) that we’ve ever seen. But it’s not some living thing, and it’s not magic. It is, at its core, just computing.
Remembering this may help you—a normal human in the world—frame where AI’s capabilities have been vastly overstated, or, in some cases, genuinely underestimated. It’ll help you remember that AI is used, like a flathead screwdriver, a keyboard, or Photoshop. You wouldn’t just “set” a table saw “to work,” would you? Treat AI as the tool it is: potentially effective, if not life-changing, and, in the wrong hands, dumb and extremely dangerous. We’re the ones sitting at the machine, and not the other way around. Time to start acting like it.
Explore the Whole GQ Guide to AI
1. Yes, we use AI, and here’s how…
Indie folk artist José González
made a video (and more) using AI.
“The labels were saying, ‘Yeah, we’re not sure about this.’ They were right.” We got more than 90 percent negative comments on the video. “It said something about the general public—but maybe more so my audience: They like the authenticity of a guy with a guitar, and they didn’t like some AI birds.” I used AI for a bit of the lyrics on the new album’s last song. “Knowing how many syllables I needed and where they should rhyme, ChatGPT was able to create sentences that made sense and ran at the right place. I did a lot of editing myself. It’s a collaboration.” When I was a scientist, I tried to figure out the structure of a protein and didn’t make it. “Then AlphaFold came along and solved 200 million protein structures in one go. So of course I felt like, This is amazing.”
Author James Frey
wants to be very specific about how he uses AI.
“I decided, since everybody always accuses me of bullshit and lying and all this kind of nonsense, if I’m going to use it, I’m going to be real open about how I use it. I admit I use it, and I don’t make that dumb ooh sound when it comes up in conversation.” It makes me a better, happier, more efficient writer. “It makes what is a difficult and lonely process of intense thought and deep reexamination of joyous and painful events in my life—and the retelling of them with words on paper—just a little bit easier. Just a tiny bit. I’m going to be real fucking clear about how I use it: as a thesaurus, to help me with spelling, to help me find songs I want to listen to but don’t quite remember, to occasionally amuse myself and cure boredom. AI doesn’t write for me. AI doesn’t have a soul. AI can’t feel or understand any human emotion or idea or feeling, and it can’t make art out of it. It can do other shit, though, and I just told you how I fucking use it.” Every writer is going to get accused of using AI. “Every writer is going to have to address this.”
Acquired podcast hosts Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal
are all in.
We talk to AI all day. Gilbert: “We talk to each other every day, but we intentionally hold back our best stuff until the recording. So we’re both independently chatting with Claude all day for weeks on end, testing hypotheses about the companies we’re researching.” It’s only about 10 percent better than us at pulling out the key insight. Rosenthal: “There’s an accepted narrative about most companies, and AI is going to feed us those myths, and then we go find the real story. Once we’ve actually made the episode, it’s quite good at finding the hook.” AI cut our selection process from 10 days to about two. Gilbert: “I had it create a rank-ordered list of episodes our listeners want. Then we took a short list, added a few of our own ideas, and used a tool called Grep to generate a pitch for an Acquired episode on each company. We’ll do full research from there, but on a topic we have high conviction is interesting, rather than starting and hitting a dead end a week in.” About two-thirds of our sponsors are AI companies now.
2. We use it, but we don’t love it.…
Fashion-store owner Alex Tao
would stock AI designs at his New York shop, Komune… but he’d judge them.
I’m not going to name any specific brands because I’m not sure they’d be comfortable with me calling them out. “I’ll see something in real life that looks pretty cool, and then I’ll hear the designer just slopped a bunch of ideas into a chat engine, created a mock-up, and went and produced it. That always degrades the design a bit.” I would stock AI designs, because we currently stock brands that do that. “But I will personally develop an aversion to the brand. Working in fashion has made it more and more difficult for me to identify why I like clothing.” I created an AI bot. “Let’s say I wanted to find models who follow our Instagram—I’d run the scraper, extract a list of all our followers, and parse for certain parameters, like model-agency initials in their bios. Anything that’s a little less public-facing, we don’t hesitate to use AI.”
Screenwriter and producer Dara Resnik
feels insane that nobody openly talks about AI.
People who will quietly tell me at a dinner party they’re using AI are scared to say it loudly. “Even if they say I’m using it as a tool—which, by the way, it is—they’re scared they’re going to be valued less in the marketplace, be seen as less of an artist.” The room was split in half. “[At this dinner party], writers on one side are screaming that this is what the WGA just won protections against. And writers on the other side are saying: I’ve been using this for years, you guys, get with the program.” Of course I don’t let it write for me. “But what used to take me hours and hours—having to comb through ShotDeck—I can now have AI do. You’ll get notes from executives that are like, what are the rules of this world? I’ll feed something in and say, are the rules of this world consistent?” That’s like two hours of work off my plate.
The anonymous Adman
says the art directors have been liberated.
AI has changed art directors’ lives. “There was a campaign where they put an inflatable dragon on the top of the Empire State Building for [the prequel to] Game of Thrones. To pitch the idea, some art director probably had to spend six or seven hours comping that up in Photoshop, getting the lighting and the shadows right. There’s hundreds of iterations internally, notes from your creative director, notes from the client, changing it, changing it back.” People would be up until two and three in the morning, excuse my French, pixel-fucking. “And now you just feed that into Runway and you give a couple reference images and it’s just that image. And it’s better.” Ad people want to clock out and work on their art. “They love to write or direct films. There’s a healthy suspicion of AI. But now you can comp quicker and go do your own personal life. Touch some grass.” AI can’t replace young, cool people. “It can’t think in transgressive or disruptive ways yet. It can’t ruffle feathers.”
AI Terms You Should Know
And some terms you must never use.
3. We avoid AI, and you should too….
Author, podcast host, and producer Manny Fidel
is letting AI take one of his jobs— but not the others.
As a producer, I might not be needed in the next five years. “The fact that this thing can do multicam editing now was a little bit jarring. I fear a world where the only video producers that have work are the ones that inject some level of artistry into the video that they’re doing.” I want to make sure I can still write an email in a couple of years. “When it asks to write an email to a potential guest? That’s when I cut it off. There are some people I know who won’t even respond to a Slack message of mine without running it through ChatGPT first, and it’s always so obvious.” I asked Claude who should come onto the show [No Such Thing]. “It responded: ‘Here are the two best candidates for people who can come on your show.’ One of the guys died in 2014.”
An unnamed R&B singer’s Creative Director
says fashion and music are already swinging back to analog.
Everybody is shooting on film again. “I’m shooting digital when it’s like [redacted]’s fit check before the party, because who cares. But any artistic project, I’ll be shooting on film.” We’ve used it for generating images for a mood board, deck, or a shot list. “Handing it off to an AI is sad. My vibe is basically: Person A spends a couple hours using ChatGPT to find or create a reference image. Person B goes to four or five different photography bookstores, they talk to the owners, they go through a bunch of things, they ride the train for an hour and a half. Let’s say Person B finds the exact same image as Person A. Who will create the better art after finding it?” But I feed it every contract I get. “Especially for freelancers, it’s just good at that. You feed it a seven-page contract or release form, and it’s like, yeah, don’t sign this, or do sign it.”
Consultant and Sneeze editor Bradley Carbone
says you can only get away with AI for dumb things.
Most of the people that use AI are the dumber people in the horde. “They use it to fill in the holes—making decks, writing emails, design stuff. When I see it, it’s a trigger that you don’t know what you’re doing. If someone sends me an AI-generated email, they go on a special list in my brain. You expect me to read all of it, but you didn’t actually read it.” Most of the cases I see are people who aren’t that smart pulling something off. “I have a friend using ChatGPT to create renders of his house, then shipping them with sizing specs to the factory in China that does Restoration Hardware and getting custom furniture delivered at like an eighth of the price. It looks good. All custom, wonderful quality.”
Alexis Hope, technologist and musician
thinks AI evangelists are gullible.
I’m hesitant to confess I don’t use AI, because I went to the MIT Media Lab. “I’m shocked by so many of my peers. We’ve been through crypto, NFTs, the metaverse…you really think this is the one?” I’ve seen so many layoffs. “I run an online coworking start-up, and job loss is really hitting our community hard. I surveyed them about AI. A lot of the creatives were haters. But many of the neurodivergent creatives were like, ‘This is my executive function. Now that I have these tools to help support my prioritization, [my] decision-making, I can actually execute on my human creative process.’ ” I have tried it. “It’s frankly just pissed me off so much that I full-force do the work myself. It’s hard to push through the valley of despair and the trough of making something shitty. Maybe AI can hold up a mirror and be like, ‘You weak fuck, you’re just trying to get this done quickly when you know the struggle is where it’s at.’ ”
The Small-Media Business Owner
who will fire you if you use it—even if that makes him sound old.
I broke up with my podcast producer over AI. “He was using AI to produce, and it was very obvious. It stripped out any laughter, any back-and-forth. I got really mad at him and that was it.” But now I wonder if I need to adapt. “Do I sound like the old print journalist who was basically shitting on the bloggers? There has to be some adaptability, more than fighting against it in a way that will only waste creative resources. Is there an ethical way of doing this at this point? If there’s not, okay, great, we’re all doomed.”
Anonymous Grammy-Winning Artist
welcomes you to use it (and make yourself obsolete).
“Take it from someone who’s on the ground [in music], the pushback against AI is monumental.” The people banging on about it—get on board or else you’re dead—are just old guys terrified of missing a boat. They’re cooked. “Or they’re part of the great wealth extraction this will create. I’ve seen it a number of times already. Someone comes along who calls themselves a disruptor, and what they really are is just someone trying to break something so they can make the same old system seem new again to resell it to you.” What gets discussed is, Oh my God, these AI artists are charting, here comes the big, bad future. “I think to myself: No one gives a shit. They’re charting because of services that control this whole thing, jamming them into an algorithm. It’s not real. Put it on tour!”
A version of this story appears in the Summer 2026 issue with the title ““Is Everyone Using AI Better Than Me?”