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In this newsletter:

• When AI Replaces Your Life’s Work

• AI Signal of the Week: AI's New Desktop Manners

• AI Future Signal: Shakespeare Meets His AI Match

• How to Use Reference Images in Midjourney (Yes, Midjourney Again!)

I see a pattern emerging that few acknowledge: When a professional identity built over decades of passion and dedication becomes an AI commodity, the crisis cuts far deeper than career. It ruptures our sense of self.

The Identity Trap

Consider Sarah, a graphic designer I recently spoke with. For 15 years, she's poured herself into mastering typography, colour theory, and visual composition.

Her clients don't just pay for her technical skills – they pay for her artistic sensibility, her ability to translate emotions into visual language. Or at least, they used to.

Now, with tools like Midjourney and DALL-E, she's watching junior designers produce in minutes what would have taken her hours of careful crafting.

"It's not just about the work," she said. "Every night for years, I've gone to bed thinking about designs. I've dreamed in layouts. Who am I if not a designer?"

(Spoiler alert: You're still you, Sarah. Even if AI learns to dream in layouts too.)

Then there's Marcus, a copywriter who's built his career on crafting prose for luxury brands. When I mentioned AI writing tools, he dismissed them with a wave. "AI can't capture the human touch," he insisted.

But beneath his bluster, his fingers drummed nervously on the table. His identity is so intertwined with his craft that acknowledging AI's capabilities would mean questioning his entire sense of who he is.

The Hidden Cost of Professional Devotion

These stories reveal a dangerous pattern in our professional culture. We've created a world where people don't just work their jobs – they become their jobs.

The software engineer who hasn't taken a vacation in five years because "coding is my life."

The content creator who measures her worth by engagement metrics.

The financial analyst who can recite market trends but can't tell you what brings him joy outside of spreadsheets…

Beyond simple automation

This isn't like previous technological shifts that simply automated routine tasks. AI isn't just coming for jobs you can learn in a week – it's mastering skills that sometimes took decades to perfect.

It's replicating expertise that required years of dedication, thousands of hours of practice, and deep personal investment of passion and energy.

How can we deal with something like this? Here is what I believe part of an answer could look like.

The Practice of Being

Like many of you, I start each day facing the challenge of self-worth. I don't wake up naturally loving myself to bits – and I suspect that's true for most of us.

That's precisely why I've built a foundation of daily practices – meditation, yoga, journaling, cold showers, walking, music, CrossFit.

People often praise my "discipline," but praising me for my discipline is like praising someone with an ulcer for their ability to eat less.

These practices aren't about discipline. They're about sensitivity - being attuned to who I am when I don't do these practices.

Without them, getting through the day in a balanced way becomes difficult.

I suspect many people share this experience without even realising it. So caught up are they in the outer, that they have lost touch with the inner.

These practices aren't luxury items for the spiritually inclined. They're lifelines in an age where professional identity can vanish overnight.

The remedies:

• A daily journaling practice to help you distinguish between your thoughts and who you are

• Physical practices like yoga or CrossFit not only ground you in your body but also help move the emotions

• Walking in nature reminds you that you're part of something larger than the digital economy

• Creative practices without professional pressure (music, drawing, writing) connect you to pure expression

Without these anchors, I've found myself easily swept up in what everyone else gets caught in: emotions, social media, drama, mental loops – all the noise that drowns out our essential selves.

The Essential Skills for an AI Age

Surviving the AI revolution demands more than updated technical skills. In his newsletter, Kyle Balmer of “Prompt Entrepreneur” fame wrote about him starting improv classes – recognising that spontaneous human interaction and creativity are skills that will only become more valuable.

"My bet is that AI will eat into the automatable, non-empathic, non face to face," he notes. "Meaning that investing time and effort in these skills is non-optimal."

The digital medium, despite its convenience, cannot replace genuine human connection and self-discovery.

These practices that connect us to ourselves and others, that ground us in our bodies and emotions, that help us explore and express our humanity – they're becoming the foundation for navigating an increasingly AI-driven world.

Ultimately, we must do more than merely survive the AI revolution - we must maintain our humanity throughout it.

This requires knowing who we are beyond our professional identities, beyond our digital interfaces, beyond our productivity metrics.

For most of us this requires daily practices of self-appreciation.

Practices that remind us of our essential - and shared - human nature.

AI Signal of the Week: AI's New Desktop Manners

OpenAI and Anthropic are exploring two flavours of AI-desktop integration – and both matter for your workflow.

ChatGPT's new feature lets it peer at your open windows, reading code and text to provide better context-aware help. Meanwhile, Claude can actually click around your computer, helping you get things done directly.

Some commentators see these as competing philosophies: "observer" versus "doer". But that's missing the point. They're complementary approaches to the same goal – making AI a more natural part of your workflow. Like having both a mentor who looks over your shoulder and an assistant who can take the wheel when needed.

The real signal? AI tools are steadily breaking free from their chat-window prisons. Whether they're watching or doing, they're becoming true desktop companions rather than isolated oracles.

*Practical Note: ChatGPT's feature is currently Mac-only and focuses on coding tools. Claude's computer control is in beta. Both require explicit user permission.

AI Future Signal: Shakespeare Meets His AI Match

The Signal

In a finding that would have been unthinkable just months ago, University of Pittsburgh researchers recently discovered that readers now consistently prefer AI-generated poetry over classical works, with over 78% of participants rating AI poems higher than those by Shakespeare, Whitman, and Dickinson.

(Sure, this might say more about modern attention spans than poetic genius – but remember when AI writing sounded like a drunk chat bot trying to explain quantum physics to a goldfish? That was early 2023. Now it's outperforming Shakespeare. Let that sink in.)

The Deeper Implication

This result points to a profound shift in AI's capabilities: machines are getting remarkably good at identifying and manipulating patterns that resonate with human minds. We're moving well beyond mere text generation – AI is learning to craft experiences that we find more compelling than their human-created counterparts.

Television has long shown us how artificial experiences can captivate human attention – but that process still relied on network executives guessing what viewers might like. TikTok's algorithm took this further, perfectly matching content to viewers – but it still depends on creators making content they think users want to see.

Now, we're removing the guesswork entirely.

AI isn't just creating content; it's starting to be able to systematically decode and exploit the operating system of the human mind.

How to Use Reference Images in Midjourney (Yes, Midjourney Again!)

For this week’s how to, let's dive back into Midjourney, because honestly, there's always something new to discover. One of the most confusing aspects for many users is the different ways you can use reference images - each producing distinctly different results.

It's like having three different buttons that all say "use image" but lead to completely different creative destinations.

Image Prompt: The Direct Inspiration

The most straightforward approach is using an image as a direct prompt, which influences everything from composition to colour schemes. It's like showing an artist a reference photo and saying "Start here, but make it your own."

You can combine these prompts with text descriptions and control how closely your final image follows the reference.

In each of the examples below I keep the text prompt “a woman doing yoga” and the reference image the same, while changing how the reference image influences the resulting output.

Style Reference: The Artistic Guide

Style references (--sref) work more like capturing an artist's essence. Rather than copying specific elements, they absorb the artistic soul of an image - its brushwork, colour palette, and overall artistic approach.

Using a Van Gogh painting as a style reference would infuse your new image with those signature swirling brushstrokes and vibrant colours, regardless of what you're creating. You can dial this influence up or down, from a gentle artistic whisper to a full stylistic embrace.

Character Reference: The Portrait Master

Character references (--cref) are perfect when you've created a character you love and want to see them in different situations.

Think of having a digital actor who keeps their distinctive features - whether that's blue hair, round glasses, or a characteristic smile - while appearing in entirely new scenes.

You can even adjust how much of their original appearance carries through, from just their facial features to their complete look.

The trick isn't just knowing these three approaches exist - it's understanding which one will best serve your creative vision, whether you're keeping a character consistent, capturing a specific artistic style, or using an existing image as a springboard for something entirely new.

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