THE HERD OF ZEBRAS THAT DREAMT OF BEING LONE WOLVES

Someone challenged me online, adopting troll-like tactics. My first instinct was Mark Twain. "Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience." Clever. Quotable. Defensible.

And completely at odds with everything I actually believe.

I caught myself. Put the quote down. Asked a harder question: what were they actually protecting?

That gap—between instinct and intention—is what this piece is about. Not which AI tool is winning. Not which platform is dead. The gap between how we're behaving in this moment and how we might choose to behave instead.

We've been here before

When I went to art school I was studying fine art painting—at precisely the moment conceptual art was king. The argument between art and craft was running hot. It had roots going back to Duchamp's urinal, but it was Damien Hirst in the late 90s who crystallised it for me personally—concept over execution, the idea as the work, the craft layer dismissed as mere production.

Hirst famously didn't make his most celebrated pieces. He hired other artists to produce them. The craft camp said the emperor had no clothes. The concept camp said the craft camp was obsolete. Both were partially right. Neither could hear the other.

What actually happened? Neither side won cleanly. The craft didn't die. Concept work didn't consume everything. The market eventually arrived at a more honest—if still imperfect—valuation of both. The tension was productive, eventually. But it took decades and damaged a lot of careers in the process.

The AI debate is the same argument. Running at ten times the speed. Much louder. And everywhere at once.

The herd

Look at your feed this week. Count the declarations. X is dead. Y replaces Z. The SaaSpocalypse is here. Every announcement treated as an extinction event. Every product launch a civilisational shift.

The loudest voices aren't the lone wolves they present themselves as. They're a herd. And not horses—zebras. Individually marked, technically distinct, but moving together, in the same direction, at the same speed. The stripe pattern that makes each one unique is exactly what makes them collectively invisible to anyone standing outside the stampede.

The irony is that the herd doesn't feel like a herd from the inside. It feels like clarity. Like being ahead of the curve. Like finally seeing what others haven't yet.

That's how herds always feel.

Two camps. Both half right.

The AI evangelical and the AI rejector are having the same argument as the Hirst camp and the craft camp. And making the same mistake—talking past each other because they're using the same words to mean entirely different things.

Here's a distinction that might help.

Baking is chemistry. Follow the steps, control the variables, get the result every time. It's a craft. It has genuine value. It takes real skill to do well.

Cooking is different. Constant variables. Judgment calls. The same ingredients producing different results depending on experience, instinct, context. That's closer to art.

AI is an extraordinary baker. Consistent, fast, cheap, tireless. It has genuinely transformed the craft layer—the production, the execution, the repeatable work that used to take hours now takes minutes.

What it hasn't replaced yet is the cooking. The judgment. The ability to read a brief beneath the brief. The experience that knows when the technically correct answer is the wrong one. The taste that was built over years of getting things wrong in ways a model has never had to.

The problem is that both camps are arguing about baking when half the argument is actually about cooking.

What the evangelical camp is missing

The "$80k video for $800" post. You've seen it. Spectacular output. Shared triumphantly. Thousands of likes.

Look closer. Non-repeatable pipeline. No editable source files. A celebrity likeness that would be pulled before broadcast. IP that belongs to nobody and everybody. Commercially unsafe, legally unusable, and produced in a way that cannot be reliably replicated when the client comes back and wants a version two.

And underneath it, sometimes, a casual dismissal. A joke about having killed someone's livelihood. A laugh-react at the craft layer collapsing.

The enthusiasm isn't misplaced. The capability is real. But spectacular and commercially viable are not the same thing. The client heard "$800." That is now the budget. For everyone. Forever. The price floor of an entire category, collapsed and celebrated in the same post.

The evangelical has proved the technology works. What they haven't worked out yet is how to do it commercially, ethically, and repeatably. And the people who know how to do that—the ones being laughed at—are exactly who they need.

The $800 video isn't a business model. It's a demo reel.

What the rejection camp is missing

The fear is legitimate. Name it precisely: AI is coming for the craft layer first and hardest. Because craft is repeatable, learnable, pattern-based. It's exactly what these tools are optimised to do.

The craft layer under pressure isn't one role. It's copywriters, voice artists, stock illustrators, UI designers, motion graphics artists, photographers. Anyone whose primary value the market has historically paid for in units of execution rather than judgment—which was always there, but harder to quantify on an invoice.

If your value lives primarily in execution—pixel-perfect, brief-faithful, technically consistent—that is under genuine pressure. That's not paranoia. That's accurate threat assessment.

But there's a conflation happening that's worth unpicking.

Some people are bakers. Deliberately, legitimately, excellently. They chose the craft layer because execution at the highest level is its own discipline and its own art. That choice deserves respect. The disruption to it deserves more than a dismissive shrug emoji and a LOL from the evangelical camp.

But here's what the rejection camp sometimes can't see yet: the skills that make someone exceptional at the craft layer are exactly the skills that make someone exceptional at directing, quality-controlling, and rescuing the AI pipeline that's attempting to replace it.

The copywriter who knows when generated text is technically correct but tonally wrong. The voice artist who understands what a performance needs that a synthetic voice can't feel. The UI designer who encodes their entire design system upstream of the tool before it generates a single pixel—asserting their judgment before the AI touches anything. The motion graphics artist who knows immediately why the output looks almost right but isn't.

That knowledge doesn't become worthless. It becomes the quality control layer. The benchmark the machine gets measured against.

The opportunity isn't "become a creative director"—the maths don't work and the assumption is lazy. It's closer to artworker becoming art director. Not abandoning the craft. Applying it at a different point in the process. Still essential. Still skilled. Different application.

The hard part is that this requires letting go of the specific application—not the value underneath it. And that's genuinely difficult when the application is what you've spent years building.

What both camps are actually protecting

When I sat with the person who'd come at me with troll-like tactics, I stopped reaching for Twain and asked what they were actually protecting. And I think I know.

The evangelical is protecting momentum. The fear underneath the bravado is that if they slow down, examine the implications, reckon with the damage—they'll lose the wave. And the wave feels like the first time in years they've had an advantage.

The rejector is protecting identity. Not just income—identity. The thing they built, the years they invested, the way they understand their own value in the world. That's not irrational. That's human.

And here's what neither camp has noticed: those two things aren't in opposition. The evangelical needs the rejector's craft knowledge to make their work commercially viable. The rejector needs the evangelical's momentum to find where their skills apply in the new landscape.

The overlaps are bigger than the gaps. The gaps are exactly what the other side could fill.

What I'm actually asking

This isn't a conclusion. I don't have one.

I left a job to think about this properly—handed in my notice in July, worked my three months professionally and above board, left the house tidier than I found it. Drew down savings. Moved from sole trader to limited company mid-sabbatical when the direction became clear. Everything as rational and planned as uncertain conditions allow.

Three months fully committed. And I'm still thinking.

I've changed my mind publicly before—I started an article calling the AI-Free sticker a gimmick and ended it somewhere entirely different. That's not inconsistency. It's the only honest way I know how to do this.

What I want is the conversation that comes after the slogan. Not agreement. Not conversion. The moment where someone reads something and thinks I hadn't looked at it that way.

Even if they still disagree. Especially if they still disagree.

The art world's argument took decades to resolve and damaged careers in the process. We don't have decades. And the careers being damaged are happening now, in real time, to real people.

The herd moves fast. Thinking moves slower. And the zebras are being ridden by lemmings—and the cliff is closer than the stampede can see.

What are you protecting? And have you considered that the person on the other side of this argument might be exactly who you need?