Let me be direct with you: I have never told you that AI is safe. I have never told you the companies building it are good people. And I am not telling you that now. What I told you, and what I stand by, is that if you want to build a skill-based business that earns real money in this economy, AI gives you the best return on effort available. Those two positions are not in conflict. In fact, holding both of them at the same time is the only intellectually honest place to stand in 2026.

Because here is what is true: AI is actively harming the planet. Data centres consume water at a scale that strains drought-ridden regions. The energy cost of training a single large model rivals the annual emissions of several cars. And that is before we get to the weapons. AI systems are being deployed in active conflict zones to select targets, process surveillance feeds, and accelerate decisions that end lives. These are not hypotheticals. They are documented. The companies building these tools, and the governments contracting them, have faced almost no meaningful consequences.

I want you to hold that clearly in your mind. Not as a disclaimer. Not as a caveat at the bottom of a business tip. As a fact you carry into every decision you make about how you engage with this technology.

"The question has never been whether AI is good. The question is what you do with the window you have — before it closes, before the opportunity concentrates further upward, and before you are left watching from outside again."

Think about the dot-com era. The late 1990s and early 2000s gave the world an extraordinary technological moment. The internet was genuinely revolutionary. It did change everything. And the people who captured the most value from it, the Gateses, the Allens, the entire social architecture that would later be exposed through Epstein's circles and Silicon Valley's worst corners, were not building a better world. They were extracting from one. They took the tools, scaled them at any cost, and used the resulting wealth to insulate themselves from every consequence that followed.

The artists of that era, the creatives, the writers, the photographers, the musicians, largely watched it happen to them. The infrastructure they built their livelihoods on was sold underneath them. The aggregators took the content, the advertising took the attention, and almost none of the economic value that flowed from creative work found its way back to the people who made it.

We are at the beginning of an almost identical moment, except this time the technology is not just a distribution platform. It is also a production tool. And for the first time, access to that production tool does not require a computer science degree, a Silicon Valley zip code, or a venture capitalist willing to take your call.

I am not asking you to endorse OpenAI. I am not asking you to celebrate Sam Altman's compensation package or pretend that the concentration of AI development in the hands of a few private American companies is good for the global south. It is not. South Africa has no meaningful seat at the table where these decisions are made. We receive the product and absorb the consequences without having shaped either.

What I am asking you to do is use the tool at small scale, for your own economic survival and your community's benefit, before the window closes.

“This is not about becoming an AI evangelist. It is about recognising that extractive systems do not become less extractive when ordinary people refuse to participate in them. The money still flows. The power still concentrates. The only difference is whether you had any of it while it moved.”

The freelancers I am talking to are artists, writers, designers, operators, and builders who are already working hard in an economy that offers them very little structural support. The formal sector has not absorbed the people who need it. Township economies run on informal infrastructure and WhatsApp voice notes because the formal infrastructure was never built for them. In that context, the moral calculus around AI looks different than it does in a San Francisco think piece written by someone with health insurance and a 401(k).

Your survival is not a lesser consideration than the purity of your politics.

A hammer built by someone with bad values is still a hammer. You do not have to hang their portrait in your studio to use it to build something real. The artists who will come out of this period with economic independence are the ones who treat AI as infrastructure, the same way a photographer treats a camera, the same way a journalist treats a search engine. You use it. You stay skeptical of it. You do not outsource your thinking or your voice to it. And you take whatever it earns you and direct it toward something that actually matters.

That might mean building a client base that buys you time to do your real creative work. It might mean earning enough to fund your family's stability while you also show up for your community. It might mean something entirely different depending on where you are in your life. I am not prescribing the destination. I am talking about the vehicle.

"The artists who will come out of this period with economic independence are the ones who treat AI as infrastructure. You use it. You stay skeptical of it. You do not outsource your thinking or your voice to it."

None of this means the companies building these systems get to escape scrutiny. They should face regulation. They should face liability for environmental damage. The military contracts that governments hand to AI companies without public debate should be challenged, loudly, through every channel available. Artists whose work was used without consent to train these models are owed something, and the fight for that acknowledgment is real and worth joining.

But those fights are political fights. They run on a different timeline than your rent. You can participate in both, in fact, the more economic stability you build for yourself, the more capacity you have to show up for the bigger battle without burning out.

The people who built wealth during the tech boom and used it for evil are a cautionary tale, not a model. The inverse of that story, the one where you build something modest and real, stay rooted in your values, and direct resources toward your people, that story is also possible. It just requires that you actually have resources to direct.

I started this platform because I believe that the gap between people who know how to use these tools and people who don't is going to become one of the defining economic divisions of the next decade. I do not want South Africans on the wrong side of that gap, not because I am optimistic about the technology's ethics, but because I am realistic about what the alternative looks like.

Eyes open. Hands on the tool. Build something worth having.

Subscribe here
Visit Profreelance