But now that we've spent a year vilifying people who use AI to enhance their content, I think "performative imperfection" is going to be the new trend of 2026. We're going to edit photos to enhance imperfections, not deemphasize them. 

Every 👏 Single 👏 Person 👏 AI generates for me is caucasian. What is AI for if not to override our implicit biases with random representation? 

Spybots... I mean, 'AI notetakers' freak me out. Not because I’m paranoid. Because I sit in on a lot of meetings that people wouldn’t want recorded. Luckily, I live in California, which is a two-party consent state.  Meaning those nosey little spybots need to announce themselves. 

The consensus: AI use is fine... when you know what you’re doing. If you don't know what you're doing, you don't know enough to catch its errors. But if they got the question right, how do you know if it was because of AI or their knowledge?

You remember the legend of John Henry, right? The guy who raced a steam engine through a mountain and then died of exhaustion? It’s a story of human triumph and the futility of resisting progress and a reminder that skill ≠ security and the physical cost of toil and the disposability of the common worker and hubris.

For my whole career I’ve been surrounded by brilliant people with access to capital who know how to turn ideas into money. I always thought there was some magic to it. That they knew something I didn’t. But these days, I’m discovering something. If I don’t tell these brilliant people that I’m not their peer, they don’t notice.

Being the only nontechnical person at a tech company always felt like being the office dog - I understood more than people thought, but didn't have the language or typing skills to do anything about it.

I get it. All this talk about replacing humans with machines is anxiety-inducing. Especially to those of us who work in a fields built on people, like HR and People Ops. It just means that you can program it using the same language you use to talk to your team or your kids.