My Side Piece Is A Robot

Nobody in my industry is supposed to admit this, so I'll throw my hat in the ring. I use AI. Most days. For my work (and also the odd existential crisis). PHEW now that my dirty little secret is out there, ain’t no going back now.

It feels like a side piece. Something supporting how I’m able to work in this season of my life, and it’s usage comes with shame. I've had this conversation with florists who are as successful as me or more, and it's always the same beat: oh, I don't use AI. Wink. Full literal, actual wink. I know colleagues who won't tell their own employees they use it, because they think they'll be judged for it. And they're not wrong; that's the thing. The judgment is real. If your work isn't pen to paper, you're not authentic, you're not a real artist, you're cheating.

So last week someone slid into my DMs. Not a follower. Very kind, actually. She said she loves my work, she's drawn to it, but my captions read like AI, and a lot of people are put off by that.

I said thank you for your feedback.

Then I reread twelve posts and panic edited at 9pm like a woman who'd been caught AI-handed. And somewhere in there I got angry, not at her, at the whole arrangement. Because I'm hiding the single most useful thing that's happened to my business in years, and I'm hiding it from people I'm actively trying to help.

So here's the skinny on how I’ve unexpectedly become team bot.

I used to do my sister's dishes so she'd read my book reports

That was the deal. She's the reader in our family. I washed up, she read my book report and checked my spelling before I handed anything in.

I'm autistic and ADHD, and words don't hold still for me. 

They arrive as whole shapes rather than letters in a row, which makes me an absurdly fast reader and a genuinely terrible speller. I've read a full page of misspelled, badly spaced nonsense straight through without clocking a thing. CAT spelled TAR and my brain files it under cat and keeps moving.

Then, before flowers, I worked at a law firm. I had more sick days that year than any other year of my life, because I hated every second of being in that building. My job was transcription. Press play on a little tape, listen to a man say words, type the words, letter by letter, spelled correctly. Me. That was my job.

That job barely exists now. You talk into your phone.

So in 2012 I became a florist, which is a wonderful career for a woman who would rather not spell anything in front of you. And then fifteen years went past.

Fifteen years of learning how this industry actually works, mostly by getting it wrong… expensively. Fifteen years of building things nobody had shown me how to build. And in fifteen years I wrote zero blogs. Not one. Not for lack of material; I had all of it.

All these thoughts were swimming in my head but executing them caused me massive anxiety. I'd write a caption, read it forty times, and not post it. I'd sit on a finished idea for months, because writing it down meant handing someone a page with a mistake in it and then waiting to see whether they'd mention it.

That's the block. It was never the thinking. It was the handover.

So here's what it actually did

It took the handover away.

À La Carte Made Easy exists because of this. A full curriculum, a year in the writing, started when I was pregnant and finished in postpartum. Fifteen years of systems I built and paid for and bled on, finally in an order that makes sense to somebody who isn't me. The thinking is mine, all of it. The punctuation had help.

Three blogs since the spring. Fourteen posts in a month, which for me is a landslide. I can get a post out while the baby naps instead of reading one caption forty times.

And the one I didn't see coming. I asked Claude what I could share that would help florists understand what the course actually does for them, and it told me to show my creative process. Fifteen years of building concepts out of nothing and I'd never once filmed it. So I did, for the first time ever, and it's the best thing on my page right now.

What I'm not doing is the part people assume. It isn't making my work. It isn't touching my photos, or any of my creating. It isn't taking the work from someone I would pay.

Who this is for is mostly women, mostly florists, a lot of them mothers, in an industry that pays badly and tells you nothing about how the money works. Getting what I know out of my head and over to them stopped being something I wanted to do a while back. It's the thing I need to do.

So when someone calls it cheating: the work was already done. Done in 2012 and every year since. What I skipped was that whole anxiety spiral when I needed to write something.

And the bit I don't have tied up

I'm a foam free florist. Sustainability and realness are on my values list as actual load-bearing beliefs, not virtue signalling jazz hands. The water, the data, the pile of things I keep half-reading and not fact checking because it's grim: that's all real and I'm not going to pretend it sits comfortably.

If your honest position is that your one use adds to the pile, then don't use it. That's your prerogative, and I respect it.

But I'm not doing the wink anymore. I don't know how to do this from home, trying to support my family, and teaching what I know to florists who can't afford to lose five years the way I did, without it. 

That one DM isn't going to stop me. It did get me to say it out loud. So genuinely: thank you for your feedback, and everyone, say hello to my lil’ AI side piece.

Disclaimer: yes, this post had AI help too. Getting it out of my head and into sentences.