Human After All - Week Six: The Mind-Blowing Reality Check
- Amber Warren
- Aug 19
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 5
Reflections of an AI Bootcamp
"This whole process from start to finish was INSANE and MIND BLOWING."
That's what I scrawled in my notes tonight, and honestly, it feels like the most accurate summary I could give you of week six. But let me back up and try to make sense of what just happened in that classroom.
Before you dive into reading, just like last week, I have provided an alternative option, using AI, I turned this blog post into a short 10-minute podcast. How cool is that?! Give it a listen below or keep scrolling if you prefer to read.
The Creative Paradox That's Been Eating at Me
We started tonight with a question that's been gnawing at me for weeks: Is spending hours in Photoshop creating an image for an ad actually producing anything? Some suggest it isn't. However, there's something that happens in those long creative sessions, those moments when you're three hours deep into layer masks and suddenly stumble onto a visual solution you never could have planned for. That's the stuff AI can't replicate, right? Those happy accidents born from human persistence and creative wandering?
Or maybe I'm just romanticizing what is, essentially, inefficiency.
The Tools That Are Changing Everything
Tonight, we dove deep into an ecosystem of AI tools that honestly made my head spin:
Mapify can take any video, PDF, or webpage and create a mind map in seconds. Picture this: you upload a dense 50-page research report, and within moments, you're looking at a clean, organized visual map showing all the key concepts and their relationships. No more highlighting, no more sticky notes, no more trying to remember what was on page 23.
Perplexity acts as your research powerhouse, built specifically for search, research, and reasoning. Instead of falling down Google rabbit holes for hours, you feed it a focused query and get back comprehensive, sourced information ready for strategic use.
The workflow we explored was almost comically efficient: Ask ChatGPT to create a prompt for Perplexity about healing your thyroid. Let Perplexity do the research. Feed that back to a larger strategy model. Download it as a PDF. Upload to Mapify for mind mapping. It's like a game of AI telephone, but each handoff makes the output more refined, not more garbled.
The New Creative Workflow That's Breaking My Brain
Here's where it gets really wild. We walked through NotebookLM, think of it as a digital trapper keeper that organizes everything and grows smarter with each input. Upload your research PDFs, and suddenly you can:
Generate podcasts from written content
Create videos from text
Ask for study guides, briefing docs, or reports
Develop audience profiles and campaign strategies
We literally watched a full campaign come together for thyroid healing products in real-time. Long-form testimonials, podcast content, white papers for healthcare providers, all generated and organized into a cohesive strategy. The "reasons to believe" (RTBs) practically wrote themselves.
The $5K Per Day Reality
Someone in class mentioned a creative charging $5,000 per day for AI-enhanced work. Five. Thousand. Dollars. Per day.
That number hit different because it forced me to confront something I've been avoiding: this isn't just about efficiency or creativity anymore. It's about economic transformation. The people who master this workflow aren't just going to be more creative, they're going to command premium rates while the rest of us figure out what just happened.
And here's the kicker, we spend our lives complaining about working insane hours, feeling depleted, never actually living. We're a society burned out on 60-hour weeks and endless busy work. Now we have mind-blowing, world-changing technology at our fingertips for minimal cost that, if we learn to use it properly, can give us back our precious time.
Making more money while doing less? That sounds fucking fantastic to me.
The Fear Is Real (And Maybe That's Okay)
We talked about the fear tonight, especially among younger creatives. There's this pattern that seems to repeat with every major innovation, initial resistance, then gradual acceptance, then wondering how we ever lived without it. "The only constant is change," I reminded the class, and honestly, even our instructor admits to feeling overwhelmed sometimes.
But here's what's sitting with me: maybe the fear is productive. Maybe it's pushing us to think harder about what makes us uniquely human. When AI can generate a mind map from a three-hour video in seconds, what becomes precious is our ability to synthesize, to make unexpected connections, to bring context and cultural understanding to the raw output.
And this brings me to something I think will become the most irreplaceable skill as AI continues to flourish: intuition.
We all have strong intuitive abilities, that inner knowing that guides us toward the right decision, the perfect creative direction, or the insight that changes everything. The problem is we've become so steadily distracted at every second of our days that we can no longer hear it. Our phones are buzzing, notifications are pinging, endless meetings, the constant noise of productivity culture, it's all drowning out that quiet inner voice that actually knows what to do.
I'm becoming convinced that those who learn to harness this power will be the ones who stand out. And those who can combine deep intuition with a sophisticated understanding of AI? They'll be unstoppable. While others are drowning in AI-generated options and endless possibilities, the intuitive human will know instantly which direction feels right, which creative concept has soul, which strategy will actually connect with people.
The Questions That Keep Me Up
After tonight's session, I'm left with more questions than answers:
If AI can handle the research and organization, are we becoming better strategists or just better at managing AI workflows?
When everything can be generated in minutes, what happens to the value of time spent in deep creative thought?
Are we approaching a world where human creativity becomes a luxury service while AI handles the bulk production?
What's Next
Next week we're meeting with an AI filmmaker. I have a feeling that conversation is going to push these questions even further. Until then, I'm sitting with this uncomfortable truth: we're not just learning new tools. We're witnessing, and participating in, a fundamental shift in how creative work gets done.
The companies that don't adapt aren't just going to fall behind. They're going to become irrelevant. "It's coming so fast," I wrote in my notes, and that feels like the understatement of the year.
But here's what I'm really sitting with: we're not just learning new tools. We're witnessing, and participating in, a fundamental change in the future as we know it.
This is part of my ongoing series documenting an AI Creative Bootcamp experience. Some weeks will break your brain. This was one of them.
Schedule a free 30 minute discovery call with me and see if we are a good fit!
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