AI Is Like Botox
Can you tell if I'm using it?
These are words I said out loud in a meeting.
The meeting was virtual, the founder was on the call, and we were looking at some freshly generated images about to be tossed onto their website.
That’s when I said it:
“AI is like Botox. You don’t want people to KNOW you’re using it.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I wondered if I should slide out of frame and pretend like the internet had cut out.
One woman graciously tried to move the conversation along while the rest of the group just stared at me, probably trying to calculate the amount of Botox I had personally received in my lifetime.
It was 2023, which feels important to say.
A time when every week brought a new image generator. Every marketing team was all: “This is incredible!” and “How else can we use this?!” while every design team was more: “Are we even allowed to use this?” and “Why does everyone have six fingers?”
And there was me — little miss Art Director exploring AI — trying to make a point about something I hadn’t made much sense of myself.
I didn’t mean to insinuate that the company should conceal anything. But then again, maybe I did? I knew what it meant for brands putting AI images out in the world. What it’d mean to get “found out”. That people could look at those images and think: if this brand is taking shortcuts here, where else are they taking them?
In a sense, I still stand by my metaphor.
Just like AI, Botox can smooth out the wrinkles and make the lines disappear. It can freeze the muscles and make the expression underneath harder to distinguish. It can make us drift towards what’s considered acceptable, what’s average — a term the design industry coined “blanding” a while ago, and the beauty industry calls “standards”.
But the other part of me knows that my metaphor is incomplete. While AI can smooth out an idea, it can also be used to finally see one.
As someone who has always been deeply pulled towards music, art and design, exploring generative AI can sometimes feel like going over to the dark side. Like I'm betraying my field, and the version of myself who thought my value was knowing how to use tools some people didn't.
Other days, it feels like the widest my imagination has ever been allowed to get, and I love witnessing the ways others are choosing to expand theirs too.
This article took an embarrassing amount of time to finish because I was writing like I was on some sort of public trial. As if I had to choose a side and defend which type of creative I am — AI-everything or none at all.
I'm not going to do that, because I can't. So if you're reading this now, it's because I trashed every other draft that came before this and decided to write from the place where I currently stand.
A Tale of Two Feeds
My Instagram feed and my Substack feed are not friends. If you looked at the content served to me on each, you’d probably think I was two different people. I weirdly like it that way. Keep them algorithms guessin’.
My Instagram is my close network of creatives — designers, illustrators, animators, local print shops, musicians. And lately, it doubles as the frontline of the AI debate.
Every other reel is a ChatGPT vs. Designer trend, where professionals prove their human designs still beat the machine. Print shops refusing AI files. Illustrators finding identical copies of their work plastered on Pinterest. Musicians with their voices cloned against their will. Business owners urging others to report designers who use AI — they're cheating and you don't owe them a dollar.
The other day, someone very close to me reposted a song on their story.
The lyrics went:
All my friends hate artificial intelligence
It’s nothing personal except it is
I see you making stupid shit
And honestly it just makes me sick
I kinda think that its dangerous, and everyone’s pretending it’s fine.
A few months earlier, I'd shown this same person the animated short I made with AI. Now I was sitting in my car, watching her story, wondering if that's what she really thought of my work too. And of me.
Over there, the position is loud. AI is betrayal, and it's causing a f*cking mess.
Then there’s my Substack feed.
My network is full of people pushing this tech in different directions. One person is architecting complex agents while another is guiding parents through AI in the classroom. They’re building brands, websites, apps, automations, art, music, animation. Some are “lightyears ahead” while others are just starting to dip their toes in. But regardless of where you are on the spectrum, everyone is mid-figure-it-out, sharing what they’re learning, seeing and thinking.
Being on Substack has changed how I think about AI, because people aren’t afraid to talk about it openly.
Then last week, Substack rolled out an AI-detection feature through its partnership with Pangram. Tap any post, note or comment and get an estimated percentage of Human vs. AI writing.
I’ll spare you another Pangram essay, because Substack already has plenty of thoughtful voices on the subject. But the consensus, in my network at least, is that it’s pointless.
Anyone who has ever used AI in their writing process knows it’s rarely clean enough to fit into a percentage. Sometimes the ideas don’t come from the tool or from you — they emerge from the exchange. The same way a conversation with a friend can produce a thought that neither of you originally walked in with.
In the creative world, that exchange is just as hard to pull apart when images or videos involve dozens of decisions — prompting, rejecting, adjusting, choosing what stays and what goes.
AI isn’t just inside our prompt boxes. It's in our browsers, our emails, phones, plugins, updates. In fact, it seems like there's a new AI feature released inside the Adobe Creative Suite almost every month. Some creatives on Instagram are almost certainly using it without knowing it. Or knowing it, and not calling it that.
Playing AI detective feels like a distraction from looking at the only thing that was ever worth judging: the work itself.
Who’s Hallucinating Now?
Just this year, Klaviyo put out a 2026 Consumer Trends report I found interesting. They surveyed nearly 8,000 consumers across eight countries on whether they could spot AI-generated images. More than 50% of respondents thought a real image was AI-generated when it wasn't. That’s a coin toss. This was after 46% of them said they were confident they could tell the difference.
The tools have become so powerful that now we’re the ones hallucinating.
A couple of months ago, I read an article from Daria’s Tech Musings about a social experiment. Someone on X posted an image, toggled on the “Made with AI” badge, and told their followers:
I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.
Commenters flooded the replies with critiques like seasoned art historians. They pointed out the glaring purple outlines around the lilies as undeniable proof of AI generation. It lacks the texture, the rugged edges, the folds, the crevices!
Then came the reveal. The image wasn’t generated by AI at all. It was a painting from Monet’s 1915 Water Lilies series. It was a trap, and one that racked up millions of views.
Nothing in the painting was AI, but the label changed what people saw. Once people believed AI was involved, every brushstroke became evidence for something else.
Sometimes the work really is careless, and we should be able to say so. But if we only keep focusing on the tool itself, that’s when we start accusing Monet — and shaming the very people we need inside these tools.
Is Anybody Home?
Distrust comes from very real things, and I empathize with what many artists are going through, because I’m feeling it too. The theft is real. The job loss and corporate corner-cutting is real. The exhaustion of not knowing what’s real or fake anymore is very real, for everyone, and not to mention scary.
For a lot of people, AI has simply become shorthand for all of it.
But when suspicion of the tool overrides any real judgment of the work itself, we end up in a witch hunt. Policing only forces the creatives who truly care about the craft into hiding. It shames people from learning in public, as if everyone is supposed to be perfect at this right away. Meanwhile, the companies really churning out careless slop — who likely never cared about detection anyway — just keep going.
Those freshly generated images on the screen in 2023 never made it onto the website.
And that was the right move, because I still believe they were wrong. I was just wrong about why.
They were wrong the way any design can be wrong — the expression was off, and it said nothing to the audience they were trying to reach. The designs didn’t feel like the brand anymore. Actually, they didn’t feel like anything at all. Just … filler.
And hiding the tool was never going to fix that.
Thanks for reading. ♡
Once you believe AI touched something, you can suddenly see the "proof" everywhere. This also kind of explains why Pangram is never going to settle anything.🩷🦩
I love your article. I use AI in lots of ways, but my stories are my own. I use Grammarly and ProWritingAid because I am a horrible typist and use too many adverbs. I never met an adverb I didn't like. I am starting a publishing business for writers over 50, and Claude helped me write a business plan. I made a beautiful website in three hours using Emergent that would have taken days and/or a fortune. I am working on a video ad with Creatify for my novel that will cost 20 bucks instead of thousands. Would it have been better if I spent thousands? Probably, but I don't have thousands, and this is fun. I did all this for less than $50. Play with it. Enjoy it. Learn from it. Just make sure your stories are your own! P.S. I am 66 years old, so everyone, please stop saying boomers can't use technology!