I started with Suno and Kling—online sites where you can make music and generate videos. I quickly learned to make both, but like everyone, I can hear and see the difference from reality in the things I make. I need to say that because you might think I am mind-blind if I don’t acknowledge it: the output is rarely the same thing as the unacknowledged standard in our heads.

But perfection has never been the point. I have been making music in my head since I was a kid, and trying to make videos intermittently since YouTube came out. I am aware of what notes on a sheet of music say; I just lack the attention span to remember so many at once, or to write them down from my head onto paper. I’d rather create the song in my head and forget it. That’s a pleasant experience for me. It’s similar with video—I know how to construct a scene, but editing is unappealing. I’d rather dream it up in my head than waste time and money filming with people for something I’m going to abandon in twenty days for the next sparkly project.

So why did I start with those AI products? It was easy instant gratification, for sure. I got to play with songs and scenes that had only existed in my head prior. So there was that. But really, it was all about how incredibly fun it is. And this is the saddest thing to me with AI right now: people won’t let down their guard long enough to just play and have fun with this stuff.

Am I a musician? Music has always been an unexpressed part of me. I lack the discipline to be a musician, but I’ve made music my whole life. Am I a scriptwriter, film director, and cameraman? On this one, kind of more yes: I’ve always been an unpublished writer, and part of that is creating scenes heavily influenced by modern cinema. But I never had the chance to go there—to actually make scenes that truly show and don’t have to tell.

These things interested me, they are something AI could do, and it was fun. This is the key to learning AI. Because it is not just a matter of telling the machine what to do and watching it magically happen. That’s really not how it works at all. It might someday, but that is not where we are right now. Instead, you have what feels like a live-action, choose-your-own-adventure video game where every interaction produces a response. You learn to improve the outcome by simply engaging. On its own, AI is fun, but when you self-generate a goal and accomplish it? That’s better than beating any video game boss at any level in any game anywhere.

I started this by saying I am sick and tired of my AI right now. And I am. But that’s the best part of the game! It’s when it frustrates you the most—when you are down and out and there’s no guide, no map of the dungeon. I’m on my own in depths where nobody can really help me, and I’m not actually mad at the AI. I’m mad because I am challenged. And I’m not challenged by some dumb work problem I’m being paid to do; I’m challenged by something I chose to do. Something I am trying to build. Something I want that becomes real if I can just coax the AI to help me create it.

You can see my music in these spots. Go ahead and judge, but when you do, remember that I have had a ball doing this. If I had more free time, I would like to expand each with videos. I am working on it, but that is significantly harder. You can see my early attempts at video, too. (I will leave links for all.)

The point is to start with the Crayola crayons of AI: do the fun stuff. That’s the message. Get your hands dirty. Open yourself up to being childlike, make mistakes, and play like nobody is watching—because that is where all the fun and learning happen. Play leads to understanding. From these simple interactions you enjoy, you will learn to interact with AI. You will learn why it’s not as simple as asking for something and receiving it. This is a new kind of work, but if you can just let your guard down and see it as play, this may be the best time in history to have a job.

Please post all your attempts on your websites and socials (your public refrigerators) with pride like I am doing here. Next time I’ll share something far more complicated to further flesh out where starting with this play lead me to next.

(Note: If you’re a Trump supporter, you may feel bad if you go there. I got jokes, that’s all. I still want you to play and learn to work with AI, whoever you are, whatever you believe.)

(This article is 85% human. I failed to make my point sharply on my own, so granted extra leeway to tighten it up.)

I have never thought Madonna was a good singer, or a good dancer, and she has never been a good actress, to be sure! And yet, she did something with each of those things that shaped our very culture. And that is art. But it’s not the art you expected. You may say in review that none of it was her talent, but there she sits at the epicenter of it all. So I argue there is real talent there, a real art. But we don’t respect it because the medium is us.

Madonna is not a Leonardo DaVinci, she’s no Ginger Rogers, she’s not even a Lady Gaga. It’s tempting to say she has no talent at all because we’re uncomfortable with the truth. She shaped us. She threw a party and invited anyone who wanted to come, and we all came. She used the tools of the music industry to paint on the canvas of civilization itself. And lest you doubt it’s real, she’s still doing it. She just had a number-one dance album at 67.

I’ve started this series by telling you, “You can do it, too.” I’ve said, “You’re already doing it.” Now I am arguing to you why it’s okay for you to do it, using Madonna as an example. Forty years ago, everyone said we can’t have this! We can’t have manufactured pop stars when real artists are suffering and nobody is buying their music. I would submit we are all Madonna now: our job is to understand the industries and skills available to us, pick them up as if they were paintbrushes, and use them to make an art nobody understands, but which everybody loves.

If you can do that, you have mastered AI.

Madonna took the intelligence of a marketing team, she took the intelligences of the likes of a Jellybean Benitez to a William Orbit, she took the intelligences of distribution masters like Sire Records all the way to Ticketmaster, and she used it all like they were just tools in a kit. She had enough intelligence of her own that, even though she was not a master of these other intelligences, she could use them effectively because she knew what she wanted. My point here is that now you have access to nearly any intelligence you need. All that is required is that you have the minimum intelligence to invoke it, just like Madonna did forty years ago.

The big companies have packaged it and commoditized it for you. You could argue they “stole” our collective knowledge, but packaging it fits better, if we’re honest. Because all cumulative knowledge and art is stolen from those before us. What we’re paying for is the packaging and access.

And my overall argument with this series is to convince you of the opportunity in front of you. I want to help you take it. The Wily Chronicle is not for that 20-year-old dude on YouTube telling you how to make $1k a minute in 6 easy steps. I wouldn’t even promise you could make $20k a year. But the truth is that you may be Madonna. You may have just enough intelligence of your own and the skills to see and use all the intelligences available to you now and push that into something real—whether that means coding a custom desktop trading dashboard, launching an open-source community directory, or engineering a local automation system that keeps you entirely off the corporate cloud. Or you may just run a small business, too, and be able to use intelligence to slowly eke out improvements in that business in a way that was not available to you before.

So as always, I don’t want to be that guy that says, “It’s inevitable, stop resisting!” Rather, I hope to show you that this is nothing new, not really. But it is a moment, and it won’t last forever. You can leverage this opportunity, but not if you reject it. It is your very unique situation that brings value to the moment, too. Take Madonna out of the equation and all you get is Stacey Q. Maybe you are only Stacey Q. But whoever you are, whatever you are, you may have just the insight needed to pull from this massive intelligence some nugget of gold that nobody else can pull from it. You have not lost value, you have gained value. You have gained opportunity, but only if you take it. You’re not stealing, you’re not fake, and you’re no less than any other success if you can pull it off. Because that is the talent—it’s just not what you think it should be.

We’ve been creeping into automation for decades. I don’t want to be another voice saying, “Just get used to it,” but we cannot put our heads in the sand. We can, however, be ready.

My message is that it is easier than ever to engage with the technology shaping our lives—in real time. When the internet arrived, people didn’t understand it. We often gloss over the fact that businesses, particularly media, were fiercely resistant because they felt the immediate impact on their bottom line.

Today we imagine everyone embraced the internet as a magical moment, but I remember bookstores closing, newspapers folding, Napster, and the chaos of early digital adoption. It was not easy, yet it was not the catastrophe the cynics predicted. But yes, we live in a world entirely different from the one twenty-five years ago.

I was at the forefront then, just as I am now. I loved the tech, but guess what? I didn’t capitalize on it. I lacked a business mind; I was too idealistic, believing the flow of information would empower humanity in a new Age of Aquarius.

Thirty years later, I’ve had my reckoning. The free flow of information turned out to be a conduit for the manipulation of information, but that is a story for another day.

The focus today is that the barriers to entry—those walls that once gave a select few an unfair advantage—have been leveled, utterly. I propose that if you are working a service or administrative role, you can compete with those who spent years in formal education but lack the raw talent for their field.

The complex skills required to navigate a high-pressure shift or manage the intricate scheduling of an executive are the exact same skills employed by those our culture tells us to admire. The only difference has been their access to specialized intelligence.

You have been practicing for the AI era your whole life and didn’t even know it.

And while I won’t dive into the shift from cloud-based subscriptions to local, home-based intelligence—just know that, as in the 80s when only the “nerdy kids” had computers, tomorrow will be the same for these intelligences.

The summary point is that you are likely already equipped to use AI to get ahead. Many will tell you there is no “ahead” to reach, but that is a mistake perpetuated by the frightened. Following those voices, or allowing yourself to despair, will only leave you behind in the exact place you fear.

If you want to be ready, talk to an AI. Play with it. Be a child with it. Pull out your verbal coloring books and draw outside the lines. Don’t fear what others call “slop,” because that AI-generated draft is akin to the crayon drawing your mother once pinned to the refrigerator, or the report cards she tucked into a special drawer, or the tee-ball trophies she polished. She saw in everything you touched the budding potential of your own brilliance. She knew you just needed the time and the experience to shape it.

For everyone else: getting it to work wasn’t a dark art, but it wasn’t easy, either. It took patience, knowing the right questions to ask, and taking a few rage breaks (I have a bad temper). The problems weren’t the AI itself, but fighting stubborn Python updates and managing the heat on a computer working harder than it has in five years.

But the result? I’m no longer talking to AI in the cloud. It starts and ends in my home. I’m not paying a bill for this other than the power to run it, and it will never tell me I’ve hit a usage limit and need to pause for a few days. My local model is dumber than the cloud, but the point of the exercise was empowerment.

My mission here is to empower the skeptics and the haters. You’re only going to hate this stuff for so long before you realize you have to catch up. But it might get expensive, and you need to know how to manage that.

I want to build this space around the idea that you’re not going to build a bot that makes you $20k a day. I don’t want to be your clickbait. I just want some folks to chat with who are trying to navigate the massive change we’re facing.

This moment is about unlocking the diversity of ideas from the masses, bypassing the narrow gates that used to let only a few stay ahead. We can complain all day that AI is the stolen intelligence of the masses, or we can see it as the collective intelligence, now accessible to you. How many people reading this took work they never really aspired to do because circumstance kept them inches away from their real dreams?

It is a precarious moment. Change is happening fast. But do you want to put your head in the ground or get your head in the game? Check back here if you want to get in the game. I’ll drop notes, songs, videos, code, and comic books—and you can do all these things, too. It doesn’t lessen what you create just because “anybody” could use AI. It just takes away the excuses for not doing your stuff.

We’re not going to be taken over by corporate robot overlords. We’re going to put them back in their place and take back what has slowly been taken from us over the last 40 years of tech. It’s okay to be scared, but let’s unfreeze this argument and get started with the revolution. (85% human content. That 15% was some HEAVY cutting because I am long winded.)