The Real AI Divide: Not What You Think
Everyone expects AI to create a divide between the haves and have-nots. Rich people get AI, poor people don't. Tech-savvy people thrive, everyone else falls behind.
I think the actual divide is completely different. And it's already forming.
Two Splits
Split One: Amplifiers vs. Fakers
Some people will use AI to amplify genuine experience, real knowledge, authentic perspective. These are people who have something to say and now finally have the means to say it at scale.
Others will use AI to fake having experience. To generate the appearance of expertise, creativity, depth — without any of the lived reality behind it. LinkedIn is already drowning in this. AI-generated thought leadership from people who've never had an original thought. Perfect-sounding content with zero signal.
For a while, the fakers will be indistinguishable from the amplifiers. But not for long. Because the audience will develop taste. They'll start to feel the difference between content that has a heartbeat and content that's just well-assembled words. The same way you can feel the difference between a Polaroid and a stock photo.
Split Two: Curators vs. Default-Accepters
This is subtler but maybe more important. AI generates output. That output has a default flavour — clean, polished, generic, agreeable. Most people will accept the default. They'll use AI to produce exactly the kind of overproduced, soulless content that was already making everything feel empty.
But some people will curate. They'll push back on the AI's defaults. They'll say "no, rougher." "No, weirder." "No, more human." They'll use AI as a starting point and then inject their own taste, their own judgement, their own hard-won sense of what actually matters.
The curators will produce work that stands out precisely because everything around it is default-flavoured slop. Their imperfection will be their signature.
The Hollowed-Out Middle
Here's the brutal part. The people who get destroyed aren't the ones at the bottom or the top. It's the middle.
If you were "competent but nothing special" — good enough at the technical work to make a living, but without a distinctive perspective or deep domain expertise — you're in serious trouble. AI can do "competent but nothing special" for free. That entire tier of professional output just got automated.
What survives? The extremes. Deep, genuine, hard-won expertise on one end. Raw, authentic, human-as-hell expression on the other. Everything in the polished middle gets eaten.
The Counter-Reformation
What I think is coming — and it's already starting — is a cultural counter-reformation against digital perfectionism. Not a rejection of AI, but a rejection of AI's default aesthetic. A demand for work that feels like a human actually made it, even if AI was involved in the process.
The Polaroid comeback. Vinyl's resurgence. The fashion for "authentic" and "raw" and "unfiltered." These aren't nostalgia. They're early signals of a deeper shift. People are hungry for imperfection because imperfection is how we recognise the human.
AI will accelerate this, paradoxically. The more AI-generated perfection floods every channel, the more valuable genuine human texture becomes. The wrinkle. The typo. The off-key note that makes you feel something. The rough edge that proves someone actually cared enough to leave their fingerprint on it.
What to Do About It
If you're reading this and wondering where you fall in this new landscape, here's my honest take:
Stop trying to be more polished. Start trying to be more you.
The advantage now belongs to people who've lived interesting lives, accumulated diverse experiences, and developed genuine taste and judgement. AI handles the rest. Your job isn't to execute perfectly. Your job is to know what's worth executing, and to bring something to it that no algorithm can generate: your specific, imperfect, irreplaceable human perspective.
That's not a nice sentiment. It's a strategic reality. And the sooner you act on it, the further ahead you'll be when everyone else figures it out.
Dave Mattu is a Welsh-British technologist, musician, and reluctant philosopher currently based in Huelva, Spain. He builds AI-powered tools for architects at skalm.space and writes about the space between humans and machines at davemattu.com.