A few weeks ago, I had coffee one morning with an older gentleman from the world of finance; the kind of person who’s fallen hard for European cars from the ’90s. He loves the elegance of the materials, the sheer over-engineering that went into building a car back then: the big petrol sedans, the low rumble of the engine on startup, the green-tinted glass that kept the cabin cool without needing tint film. But what we actually talked about was how much he’d started using AI to help with his investment. What he did with all the time it freed up. He’s the kind of man people describe as “not old, but classic.”
In an age when AI is ready to be the smartest personal assistant any of us will ever have, it’s strange how many people get so little out of it. They toss in a sloppy prompt, get back something flat and generic in that unmistakable AI voice, and just accept it wholesale: copying, pasting, sharing it around, letting the whole internet read articles written by a processor chip, without ever pausing to apply any judgment or taste of their own. They slowly train their readers to lose their own taste too, generation after generation.
“Garbage in, garbage out.” That old rule still holds completely true. In my view, if you want AI to become a genuinely powerful tool, you have to step into the role of curator – someone discerning, someone particular. Think of it like choosing a good tailor to cut you a suit, or a trainer at the gym who actually understands your body well enough to shape it the way you want. AI can generate patterns and possibilities all day long, but it will never know what it feels like to walk into a room to close a big deal wearing a suit that drapes exactly right — the confidence that gives you, so different from something off the rack. That’s something deeply personal, not something you can outsource to a model trained on the internet’s accumulated knowledge.
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