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The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers.
Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth.
This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread.
Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem.
If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.
64 - Stop Being A Tool
So, it is currently May 2026. And if you work in a creative field—and if you’re anything like me—you are likely feeling a specific kind of vertigo.
It’s the feeling of the ground beneath your feet moving, shifting, and becoming... well, unstable. It’s that low-frequency hum of anxiety you feel when you open a new software update and realize a task that used to take you six hours now takes six seconds.
But here is the thing we aren't talking about enough: The vertigo, that I think we’re all feeling, isn't actually coming from the technology. It’s coming from the Great Decoupling.
Let me explain what this meas.
Basically, for the last century—and certainly the last decade—we have been conditioned to believe a profound, structural lie: that our value as human beings is inseparably linked to our output. We were raised on the 'Productivist Fallacy.' The idea that if you aren't 'producing,' you aren't 'valuable.'
We didn't just take jobs; we became the labor. We turned our hands, our eyes, and our technical expertise into our primary identity. We called ourselves 'creators,' but in the eyes of the market, we were just high-end processors.
Now, the machines are doing the producing. And they are doing it faster, cheaper, and with a level of competence that borders on the uncanny. But AI hasn't just stolen our tasks. It has done something much more painful: It has exposed our addiction. It has pulled back the curtain on the fact that we’ve spent our lives building our worth on the 'labor of the hand.' And now that the hand is no longer required, we’re left staring into a mirror, wondering if there was ever anything else there.
That is the problem we’re solving today. Because there is something else.
In this era of infinite, automated output, we have to move from being a Resource to being a Source. A resource is something to be extracted and used up. A source is where the water comes from in the first place.
If you define yourself by your utility, you are a tool. And in 2026, tools are a commodity. But if you define yourself by your Intent—by the specific, glitchy, human 'why' behind the work—you become the only thing a machine can never replicate.
We aren't losing our value. We are finally being forced to find where our value actually lives.
Well, my name is Patrick Fore and this is The Terrible Creative. Honest conversations about creativity, identity, and the existential weight of making things in 2026. Today is Episode 64. I’m calling it Stop Being a Tool - or why it was never about your utility.
So last episode we talked about 'The Cost of Getting Good'—the bunker we build out of our own competence. This week, we’re looking at what happens when the machines take that competence and turn it into a commodity. It’s an episode about what happens when the 'doing' disappears, and all that's left is the 'being.'
Today we’re talking about three things: The Productivist Fallacy, The Science of the 'Leap,' and The Identity Audit.
If this is your first episode, feel free to jump around. They're in no particular order. Email is always open—link is in the show notes. I respond to everything.
bLet's get into it.
So, let’s start with a story. I want to tell you about my friend Maya and my friend Chris.
Maya is a high-end illustrator in Brooklyn. In the world of 2025, she was at the top of her game. She spent fifteen years in what I like to call the "subterranean dirt" of her craft. She mastered the specific, real, agonizing way light hits oil paint—the way a shadow isn't just a darker version of a color, but a bruised purple or a deep, vibrating green. She spent a decade and a half training her hand to obey her eye with the accuracy of a brain surgeon.
Then came March 2026.
A new model was released—Nano Banana 2 Pro. Suddenly, the lighting style that took Maya fifteen years to perfect could be mimicked by a stranger with a three-word prompt. In forty-five seconds, a machine produced what Maya used to spend a month laboring over.
When I talked to her, Maya didn’t just say she felt broke. She said she felt hollow. She looked at her brushes and saw sticks of wood. She felt like her "practice" was a waste of time. "If a machine can do in seconds what took me a decade to learn," she asked me, "then what was the point of the decade?"
And here is the thing: Maya isn’t just grieving the loss of a job. She’s grieving the loss of her identity as a craftsman. We have spent so long equating "the work" with "the labor" that when the labor is automated, we feel like the work has vanished.
But Maya’s craft was never actually the brushstroke. It was the way she saw the light before the brush even touched the canvas. The machine stole the stroke. It can’t steal the sight. It can’t take your voice.
Which brings me to Chris. Chris is a headshot photographer in Seattle. He got into the game when he lost his job as a product manager for a tech company back in 2013. He was looking for something he could build with his own hands. And he loved it. He loved controlling his income, the rhythm of the studio, and about that though, he loved the challenge of making a nervous lawyer or a tired software engineer look extraordinary. He loved connecting with people, he often joked that his headshot sitting are really therapy sessions with a free headshot.,
And he was good at it. Chris loves people, and people loved Chris. He could take a nervous, paralegal, self conscience about their looks, and through his ability to connect, could make not just look incredible, but also feel incredible.
And because of that skill, he was doing well. He supported his family. He had a small, light-filled studio in the Seattle neighborhood of Queen Anne. 90% of his clients were the tech workers and executives that made Seattle move. But since 2025, he’s seen his revenue drop by 35%.
It wasn’t that the world stopped needing headshots. It’s that they stopped needing him to take them.
His clients—the same tech workers who used to value his 'eye'—started using AI headshot generators. For a $20 subscription and a few uploaded selfies, a machine could give them a 'professional' portrait in a charcoal suit they don't even own, standing in an upscale lobby that doesn't exist.
And Chris sat in that Queen Anne studio, looking at the $30,000 worth of gear and glass he’d spent a decade paying off, and he realized a brutal truth: The market had classified him as a printer.
He thought he was being paid for the 'connection' or the 'experience.' But for 35% of his clients, he was just a technical hurdle between them and a JPEG. And as soon as the hurdle was removed, they didn't look back.
This is the shadow side of Maya’s story. If Maya is grieving the loss of her aesthetic, Chris is grieving the loss of his utility.
Both of them are facing the same terrifying realization: If your value is in the 'Doing'—the clicking of the shutter or the mixing of the paint—you are a Replaceable Resource. And in 2026, resources are being replaced by cheaper alternatives.
The lesson Chris had to learn—and the lesson Maya is currently struggling with—is that the 'doing' was never the gold. The gold was the Witness. The gold was Chris’s ability to see the insecurity in a CEO’s eyes and know exactly how to talk him out of it.
The machine can generate the pixels. It can’t sit in a room in Queen Anne and tell you that you're enough.
So, if you’re looking for a 'return to normalcy,' I have some bad news. The data suggests that normalcy has left the building.
According to the Yale Budget Lab’s March 2026 Report, freelancers in creative sectors—designers, writers, photographers, programmers—are seeing roughly 25% to 35% of their daily tasks fully automated. We aren't talking about 'future' threats anymore; we are talking about the current billing cycle.
We are seeing what economists call a Bifurcation of Value - which is defined in two parts.
The Production Floor: Basic production roles are seeing a 15% wage decline. If your value proposition is 'I can do this task,' you are now competing with a tool that costs $20 a month and never takes a smoke break.
The Strategy Ceiling: Meanwhile, 'Creative Orchestrators'—those who manage AI to deliver high-level strategy and vision—are seeing a 30% increase in contract value.
[PAUSE]
Now, let’s address the BMW in the room. Because I know some of you are listening to this in your nice new car, or your studio, and you’re thinking: 'Patrick, I don't feel this. My books are full. My rates are up. My clients haven't mentioned AI once. You’re being dramatic.'
And you might be right. For now.
If you aren't feeling the vertigo yet, it’s likely because you are standing behind a Moat. And for most of us, that moat is built out of two things:
1. The Trust Moat: This is the legacy of your relationships. Your clients aren't paying for your labor; they’re paying for the fact that they’ve known you for ten years and they know you won't flake. They’re paying for the comfort of a known quantity. You’re living on the interest of your past reliability.
2. The Skills Moat: This is where I find myself to some extent. You’ve worked with the right brands. Your portfolio is a wall of high-end evidence that you know what the fuck you’re doing. Maybe your marketing is dialed in, your SEO is solid, and the stream of new leads is relatively steady. You have a Signal of Authority that the AI doesn't have yet. Clients see your work as 'Premium' because the market has already vetted you.
[PAUSE]
But here is the danger of a Moat: It can make you feel safe while the climate is changing. A solid portfolio is just a record of how well you used to 'do' things. Good SEO is just a way to keep people walking into your shop. But if your shop is primarily selling 'labor'—if you are being paid for the technical execution of a task that is being automated for pennies across the street—eventually, the moat dries up. The legacy brands will notice the price difference. The SEO will lead people to a service they realize they can do themselves.
A moat isn't a strategy. It’s a delay.
The moat buys you time. That’s all it does. It buys you the window you need to realize that the market is no longer paying for 'the labor of doing.' It is paying for 'the risk of deciding.' In a world where anyone can generate a thousand iterations of a logo or a headshot in an hour, the labor has become a commodity. The value has shifted entirely to the person who can look at those thousand options and say: 'Number 432 is the only one that actually tells the truth. We’re going with that.'
That person is taking a risk. If 432 fails, it’s on them. The AI doesn't get fired; the person who chose the AI does. You are being paid to be the person who is responsible for being right."
So, why does this hurt so much? Why do we feel so much guilt when we use these tools to speed up our workflow? I know I do. I rely on AI heavily to do everything from manage day-today projects to research data for this podcast.
And, I think it’s because we’ve been living inside what I call the Productivist Fallacy. This is the deeply ingrained belief that a human being is essentially just a 'unit of production.' It’s an industrial-era hangover that tells us we are only as good as our last shift.
To understand why this is a trap, we have to look at a distinction made by this philosopher named Immanuel Kant back in the late 18th century.
Now, stick with me here, because this feels more relevant in 2026 than it ever did in 1785.
Kant argued that everything in the world has one of two kinds of value.
First, there is Instrumental Value. This is the value of a 'means to an end.' Think of a hammer. A hammer is valuable precisely because it drives nails. Its value is entirely dependent on its utility. If a better, faster, more efficient hammer comes along—say, a pneumatic nail gun—the old hammer isn't just 'lesser.' It’s irrelevant. It’s discarded. It doesn't have a 'self' to fall back on; it only has its function.
For the last century, the market has convinced us to view our careers—and by extension, ourselves—as instruments. We turned our technical skills into our primary value proposition. We said, 'I am valuable because I can code this,' or 'I am valuable because I can retouch this photo.' We made ourselves the hammer.
And now, in 2026, the machine has become the nail gun.
Then, there is Intrinsic Value. This is what Kant called an 'End in Itself.' He argued that human beings possess a value that is independent of their utility. You aren't valuable because of what you do; you are valuable because of who you are—your consciousness, your agency, your ability to experience the world. You are the 'End,' not the 'Means.'
This is the 'Great Decoupling' I mentioned earlier. For the first time in history, our Instrumental Value is being stripped away. The 'doing'—the labor, the technical execution—is being handled by the machines.
And that is terrifying, because most of us have forgotten how to be anything but an instrument. We’ve spent so long being 'Human Resources' (not the department at your job here) that we don't know how to be 'Human Sources.'
If you define yourself by your utility, the machine is your replacement. But if you define yourself by your Intrinsic Value—by your perspective, your history, your 'glitches,' and your specific human 'Why'—the machine becomes something else entirely. It stops being your replacement and starts being your tool.
The crisis of 2026 isn't a loss of work. It’s a crisis of identity. We are being forced to remember that we are the ones the work is for, not the ones the work is done by.
I want to give you a win here, because it’s easy to feel like the machines are winning everything. They aren't.
In early 2026, the IDIBELL UB Brain Cognition Group published a study in Advanced Science that looked at the neurological difference between AI "creativity" and human imagination.
They found that AI is world-class at Predictive Recombination. It looks at everything that has ever been done and predicts the most likely "new" version. It’s a very, very fast librarian.
This is why, on this podcast and in my book, I hammer on the fact that Finding Your Voice is so important.
I know it can sound like 'soft' advice. Like something you’d find on an inspirational poster in an office that’s about to lay everyone off. But in 2026, finding your voice is a survival strategy.
When I talk about doing 'Honest Work'—the kind that comes from the deepest, subterranean parts of who you are—I’m talking about Proprietary Data. The machine pulls from a catalog of humanity. It has scraped the collective output of the world.
But it doesn’t have a catalog of you. It doesn't have the data on your specific traumas, your weird obsessions, or the way you felt when you were ten years old and saw the Pacific for the first time. It doesn't know why you’re drawn to a specific shade of rust or why you prefer the silence of a studio to the noise of a set.
This is why I tell you to do the 'Terrible' projects. The ones no one asked for. The ones that don’t make sense on a spreadsheet. The weird, unmarketable work that you make simply because you think it should exist.
The AI would never make those things, because it can’t pull from the catalog of your worldview.
If you make things that are 'marketable,' you are competing with the machine. But if you make things that are Honest, you are standing on ground the machine can’t even see. The 'Why' behind your work is the only thing that keeps you from being a commodity. It’s the difference between being a high-end printer and being a Source.
So In 2026, Technique is a commodity. It’s a baseline. If you can describe it, a machine can execute it.
Taste, however, is a premium asset.
James Taylor (not the folk singer who wrote Sweet Baby James), wrote in his 2026 book SuperCreativity, about two archetypes for the modern creative: Centaurs and Cyborgs.
The Centaur: This is a split model. The human does the strategy and the high-level vision; the AI does the heavy lifting of production. You are the architect; the machine is the construction crew.
The Cyborg: This is a deeply integrated model. The AI becomes an extension of your very thought process—a brush that thinks with you, a code-editor that finishes your sentences.
In both models, the "Expert" has been replaced by the "Taste-Maker." Your job is no longer to be a technical master of a software suite; your job is to be a master of Curation. You are moving from "I make things" to "I curate experiences."
This requires a different kind of practice. It requires you to stop studying how to use the tool and start studying why things work. It means reading more history, watching more film, and spending more time in the "Subterranean" parts of your own life. You are building a library of Taste.
So, I want to invite you to do something practical. It’s an exercise I call the Identity Audit.
Take a piece of paper. Draw a line down the middle.
Column A (Technique): List everything you do that a machine can now do. Color grading. Resizing images. Basic drafting. Writing standard copy. Summarizing meetings. Grieve this column. Acknowledge that this part of your "labor" is gone. It is no longer "you."
Column B (Essence): List the things a machine cannot do. The way you handle a difficult client’s ego. The specific trauma or joy that influences your color palette. That "gut feeling" that a design is wrong even when the math says it's right. Your ability to connect two completely unrelated ideas to solve a human problem.
Look at that second column. That is the signal. That is your actual career. Focus on that. Study it. Look for ways to off load all tasks from Column A and focus your time, energy and mental capital on Column B.
Your mantra for 2026 should be this:
I am not the output in Column A. I am the observer in Column B.
I want to leave you with one final image.
In the economic world, there’s a term that gets thrown around in boardrooms and on balance sheets: 'Human Capital.'
It’s a phrase designed to sound sophisticated, but when you strip it down, it’s an accounting term. It frames you as an asset to be managed, measured, and maximized—no different from a fleet of delivery trucks or a server farm in the desert. 'Capital' is something you invest in to get a return. And the minute a cheaper, more efficient alternative appears, 'Capital' is liquidated.
In the eyes of the Productivist Fallacy, that’s all you are. You are a Resource.
[PAUSE]
But you aren't a resource.
A resource is what you get when you bottle the water and ship it to the store. A resource is an extractable commodity that eventually runs dry.
You are a Source.
A Source is the place where the water comes from in the first place. The AI can process the water. It can bottle it with beautiful, algorithmically-generated labels. It can ship it across the world in milliseconds. But the machine can never, ever be the spring.
You are the spring.
Your worth isn't in the 'Capital' you provide to a company; it’s in the 'Source' you provide to the world. Your value isn't in the 'content' you churn out; it’s in the 'intent'—the specific, human Why—behind it.
In other words, your value is in your voice. Your unique, weird, HUMAN way of seeing and moving in the world.
And If you’re listening to this, and you feel like the world is moving too fast, take a breath. The 'doing' is being handled. The labor is being automated. This isn't an ending; it’s an invitation. It’s an invitation to stop being an instrument and start being an 'End in Itself.'
Stop being a resource. Start being the source.
Stay curious. Stay courageous.
Stay terrible.