I was watching a Minecraft video on YouTube with my son. He turned to me and said, “The ones in ‘For You’ are better.” The algorithm got him already. At age seven, he’s learning that curated beats chronological, that personalised trumps searching.
That comment captured something I’ve spent the best part of 20 years helping to build. An entire infrastructure designed around one principle: you shouldn’t have to try too hard.
Where we’ve been heading
My career has been built on making things easier. SEO ranks websites higher, so people find answers faster. Paid search ads put results at the top, so nobody has to scroll. Landing pages remove friction from every purchase decision.
I appear to have been part of the problem.
The timeline is worth laying out. Spellcheck came first, turning on by default in some Windows update nobody remembers. Then Grammarly arrived, and spelling became optional. Now we’re in deeper territory. Canva templates replaced basic design skills. Keyword research tools do competitive analysis while you sleep. Google Ads campaigns that once required craft now run themselves. The “boost post” button promises 100,000 impressions to people who will never remember seeing it. AI builds landing pages, then entire sites, then the content that fills them.
The shortcut is the way
I had a colleague who used ChatGPT for everything. Email responses, Slack messages, work briefs. The basics made sense. Admin made sense. The problems started when critical thinking was required. Instructions that needed context. Decisions that needed judgment. The AI couldn’t provide those things because the person prompting it didn’t have them either.
Another one uses AI for hacks. Hacks for things they couldn’t do manually in the first place. Stop downloading plugins and extensions to solve problems you can’t solve yourself. How do you know that’s what you need if you never learned the original skill?
I’ve watched junior staff with AI apps produce faster, shinier work than a designer with three years of experience and a graphic design degree. Not better than someone with a decade of experience, but good enough that nobody could tell the difference at first glance. The designers who refused to use AI looked slow by comparison.
Then there was the boss using ChatGPT to write performance reviews. Setting goals and targets based on prompts that felt flimsy at best. Managing humans through an interface that doesn’t understand humans.
What the tools can’t give you
I just built a five-page website by prompting for a wireframe off a deck and some attachments. Sounds easy. The deck took three years to make. Three years of company changes, mistakes, losses, and 20 years before that of tinkering so I know what I’m asking for. I didn’t prompt “wireframe me a website.” Everything led up to me knowing what needs to be done.
Nobody told me to download a color palette and CSS from an existing site. Nobody told me to ask ChatGPT to recommend hosts that work with React code. I knew what the questions were. I knew some of the gaps. And I learn fast now because I discover the gaps quicker.
That’s what 20 years gets you. The ability to use AI without it using you. Rounds of questions, a business degree, and enough scar tissue to write prompts that produce something useful.
Where this leaves us
There’s a difference between using AI to increase productivity and using it to replace the foundations entirely. I’m not against the first one. I use AI.
Check your own work before Grammarly does. Write your own hooks, taglines, and brand names before asking ChatGPT for ten options. Those creative elements are what separate marketing from automation. If we outsource them completely, they die out.
The problem isn’t AI in workflows. The problem is people who never earned their stripes operating at scale with tools they don’t understand. Surface-level knowledge produces surface-level work that looks professional enough to fool everyone, including the person who made it.
The Matrix had it right. Knowing the path isn’t the same as walking it. But we’ve built an industry where nobody walks anymore. They ride algorithmic chairlifts to the top and call it mountaineering.
The long way round
I’m documenting the painful path to growth, step by step, at rebelmarketer.co.uk. No shortcuts. No done-for-you templates. Just the manual work that most marketers have forgotten how to do, or never learned in the first place.
If you want to see what it looks like when someone does it the hard way in 2025, that’s where I’ll be. Building things that take longer than they should, because that’s how you learn what you’re building in the first place.