My mum is currently doing a PhD. She’s 75 and her goal is to submit her thesis by the time she turns 80!!
This obviously isn’t a career move (she’s been retired for years), she’s doing it because she wants something meaningful to work on and think about.
I talk to her about AI all the time because I’ve done a PhD myself and can see heaps of places where it would make her life easier e.g. the reference list alone is enormous in a PhD and she's collating all of it by hand. I’m not talking about getting AI to write her thesis, I mean using it to edit and check the hundreds of references are in the correct format or to find additional research sources or turn messy notes into something more coherent. But she wants nothing to do with AI and refuses to use it.
She has two reasons.
The first is because she's worried she'll accidentally plagiarise something, which is obviously a valid concern in post-grad research. But the second is on principle. She wants to do the thinking herself and turn her ideas into writing the “good old fashioned way”. The struggle of actually grinding through the PhD and the human intellectual challenge is her whole point of doing it.
I read an email from Alex Hormozi this week that came at this same idea from another direction. His argument is that everyone is obsessed with AI right now and treating it like the only thing that matters when it's really one more tool sitting alongside every other way there is to grow a business. He rightly said that marketing still matters, human relationships still matter, decision making still matters, how you delver your work still matters. AI is just one more tool that creates leverage and growth in business, but it’s not the most important thing.
There are a lot of designers using AI right now because the “AI experts” have guilted them into thinking they are doing something wrong if they aren’t using it. So they are spending hours tinkering with the latest flashy tool instead of working on what is actually keeping their business stuck.
Underneath all of this sits the theory of constraints, which is a fancy way of saying your business is only ever held back by one thing at a time. If nobody knows you exist, AI won't fix that. If people find you and never book a consult, AI won't fix that either. If you win the client and then deliver the job late and over budget, no AI tool is going to rescue the client relationship. Work out what’s stopping your business growing and put your energy there. Most of the time AI has nothing to do with it and won’t help you at all.
I'll happily encourage you to let AI turn messy site notes into a clear action list or analyse your website copy and point you to where a client would get confused. That's a sensible use of AI. What I wouldn’t tell you to do is use AI to generate an “AI slop” fee proposal that potential clients cringe at or produce design work in mood board generators. This is what some of the AI experts are encouraging you to do, but that’s because those are “magic tricks” that get them lots of views on Instagram. They are also things that will hurt your business e.g. clients who read your AI slop fee proposal think "I have a lot of money on the line here, what else are they going to use AI for?? Let me find another designer who isn't doing this."
For my mum the outcome of her PhD is proving she can still do hard intellectual work on her own. For you the outcome is probably a business that makes good money and is enjoyable to work in. AI only matters to the degree it moves you closer to that goal. If a tool helps you with admin and gives you back an extra day a week to spend on design or on site with clients then use it. But if it just makes you feel “up to date” while you fiddle with mood board generators that haven't won you a single project then you're my mum in reverse, using AI for the sake of it and getting nothing back that counts.
So only use AI to the extent that it actually helps you achieve your business goals and ignore the latest shiny thing the AI experts are sharing. Remember their goal is to go viral and sell you things, your goal is to build a business that makes money and potential clients don't cringe at.
By the way, if you need help working out why your business isn’t growing watch THIS VIDEO next. I unpack the step by step path to building an interior design business that’s capable of making $15,000+ per month. It’s free on my YouTube channel.
