Both Hands Full

I didn’t ask for this. None of us did.

One day you’re a photographer, designer, writer, filmmaker building a career on skills you spent years developing. The next day, someone in Silicon Valley has scraped your work into a dataset, trained a model on it, and is selling the ability to generate something “like yours” to anyone with twenty bucks a month.

My work is in there. I released thousands of photos on Flickr under Creative Commons over the past two decades, and when I checked a dataset search tool, I found roughly 1,800 of my images in a major training corpus. That doesn’t mean every AI model used them, training pipelines vary, and the tool shows evidence, not certainty… but it means the consent story around AI is exactly as casual as critics claim.

I’m sympathetic to the people who want to resist. I understand the impulse to refuse, to opt out, to fight back. But I’ve also spent the last two years working with hundreds of creative professionals who are trying to figure out what to actually do in this moment. And what I’ve learned is that neither pure resistance nor uncritical adoption gets you anywhere useful.

So I’m asking you to walk forward with both hands full.

The Non-Consensual Moment

Let’s name what’s real. The consent problem is real.

AI systems were trained on the creative output of humanity… photographs, writing, code, music, art… largely without permission. Some of us released work under licenses that technically allowed it. Many didn’t. The fact that companies are now settling billion-dollar lawsuits over training data tells you everything you need to know about how legitimate those practices were.

The junior pipeline problem is real. The entry-level work that used to train senior creatives is disappearing fast. You’d get hired at a studio, spend six months converting approved assets into different formats, and in the process learn the systems, the clients, the back-and-forth. That’s how juniors became seniors. When AI handles that work, we lose the pathway and we don’t yet know what replaces it.

The dependency question is real. If you don’t use a muscle, you lose it. What happens when we stop doing the first stages of creative work ourselves? When we outsource idea generation, research synthesis, early drafts? We’re all participants in an experiment we didn’t sign up for, and the results aren’t in.

These aren’t hypothetical concerns. They’re happening now. Anyone who tells you they’ve got it all figured out is either selling something or not paying attention.

And yet.

I’ve spent two years rebuilding my creative practice around these tools, and I’ve never felt more capable.

Not because the tools are magic, they fail constantly, in ways I’ll get to… but because learning to work with them has forced me to get clearer about what I actually bring to the work. The parts that are mine.

Both things are true. The system that created these tools violated consent on a massive scale, and working with them has made me a better creative professional. I’m asking you to hold that contradiction and keep walking.

The Human Moat

Here’s the part that matters most, and the part that’s hardest to hear: if you don’t know who you are as a creative, AI will expose that.

AI is a mirror. It amplifies whatever you bring to it. Bring confusion, get generic slop. Bring clarity about your perspective, voice, and values, get something that actually sounds like you.

The people I’ve watched thrive with these tools aren’t the most technically sophisticated. They’re the ones who can answer questions like: What do I believe about this work? How do I make decisions? What would I never say? What do I notice that others miss?

This is the human moat. Not “creativity” in some abstract sense, everyone claims that. The moat is judgment. Taste. Discernment. The ability to look at ten options and know which one is right, and be able to articulate why.

HERE'S HOW WE PRACTICE THIS

This is exactly what Peter Bittner and I teach in AI Upgrade for Creative Professionals.

Over 100 graduates across 7 cohorts. Writers, designers, photographers, strategists, filmmakers. People who showed up skeptical and left with agency.

Cohort 8 starts February 5th. Three spots left.

This isn't about tool hype or twelve-subscription stacks. It's about workflows that give you clarity about who you are as a creative in a moment when AI will expose everyone who doesn't know.

What you'll build:

• Week 2: Your own ‘Second Brain’ knowledge base… built from your work, trained on your material, reflecting your judgment

• Week 3: Prompting frameworks that capture your voice, not generic AI slop

• Week 4: AI assistants that amplify your creative DNA instead of flattening it

• Week 6: A capstone project that proves you can hold both hands full and keep walking

Six weeks. 90-minute live sessions every Thursday (12-1:30pm ET). Two personal coaching calls with me. Hands-on labs. Professional certification.

The investment is $1,499. What you're actually getting: clarity about who you are as a creative in a moment that didn't ask your permission.

THE INVITATION

The most critical voices on AI… the skeptics, the resistors, the people with genuine concerns about consent and labor and dependency… those are exactly the people we need engaged in this conversation.

If the most thoughtful critics opt out, the decisions about how this technology develops get made by the people who are all-in. The governance. The norms. The policies. They're being shaped right now by whoever shows up.

I'm not asking you to abandon your critique. Keep it. The fears are real. The problems are real. The non-consensual nature of this whole situation is real.

But engage anyway. Learn enough to know what you're criticizing. Get in the room, because the room is making decisions whether you're in it or not.

Both hands full. Left hand holds the critique… the stolen work, the collapsing pipelines, the genuine uncertainty about what we're creating. Right hand holds the curiosity… the workflows that might give you back some agency, the clarity about your own creative identity that the mirror forces you to develop.

Walk forward. The moment didn't ask your permission. Neither did any of the other moments that reshaped creative work… the printing press, photography, digital tools, the internet. Creatives have always had to navigate new capabilities that threatened to commodify their work. The ones who thrived learned to use the new tools while holding onto what made them irreplaceable.

This moment is no different. Harder, maybe. Faster, certainly. But not different in kind.

Both hands full. Keep walking.

Enroll here: https://www.theupgrade.ai/courses/ai-upgrade-for-creative-professionals

— KK

P.S. Peter and I co-teach this. I bring the creative practice and philosophical framework. He brings 8 years as a UC Berkeley journalism lecturer and his work with New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg. The combination works.

P.P.S. If you're reading this thinking "finally someone gets it"… this course is where we actually do the work.