It’s Halloween week, so let me tell you a scary story. You probably know it from Disney’s Fantasia.
The sorcerer goes up to bed and leaves his apprentice with a chore: fill the big tub with water from the well, bucket by bucket. The apprentice has a better idea. He puts on the sorcerer’s hat and casts a spell on a broom, and the broom picks up the buckets and goes to work. So the apprentice settles into the sorcerer’s chair, dozes off and dreams about how powerful he is. He’s moving the stars around. He’s commanding the ocean.
Then he wakes up with water in his lap.
The broom never stopped. The tub filled up a long time ago, and the broom is still hauling water. The apprentice doesn’t know the spell to stop it, so he grabs an axe and chops the broom to pieces, and every piece gets up, grabs a bucket and keeps going. Pretty soon there’s an army of brooms, the workshop is flooding and the apprentice is splashing around trying to keep his head above water.
The German poet Goethe wrote that story as a poem in 1797. I’ve been working with artificial intelligence tools for about two years, and it’s still the best description of them I’ve found.
Why does AI feel like magic?
As you may know, Ridpath Creative Partners turns 25 this January. Over those 25 years I’ve worked with a lot of people who helped me complete projects of all kinds, and I especially appreciated the ones who knew more than me. AI is a new kind of helper. If you’ve started using it in your business, you’ve probably noticed what I have. It’s very hard to wear out. It doesn’t do much talking back or arguing (neither did the broom). It will keep working even when you want to take a break or you’re done for the day.
It can also take you past what you know how to do. I had ideas for websites and systems I knew could be done, because I’d seen other people doing them, but I didn’t know how to do them myself. Seeing that something’s been done has always been how I look at the world. If somebody else did it, I know I can do it. The same goes for you. If you’ve seen it done somewhere, there’s a good chance AI can help you do it too. AI is that character who can do almost anything.
What’s great is you don’t have to stop being you or stop doing your work. You just get to do it a lot faster. I wouldn’t always say better, but you can work through more options quicker, because it never wears out.
Where does it go wrong?
Well, it’s like a really smart, dumb assistant. I’d say the biggest weakness of AI as a business tool is its lack of common sense. It will follow rules to the nth degree.
That’s the apprentice’s broom. It does what it was told, long after anybody with common sense would have stopped. It doesn’t know the tub is full. It doesn’t know the floor is under water. To break it down in the simplest way I can, AI doesn’t know that a billion, a trillion or a quadrillion buckets of water have no value once the workshop is flooded.
And then there’s the nap. That’s the part of the story I see most often. You think you’ve got this tool that’s doing great stuff, so you lean back and start imagining everything it’s about to get done for you. The next thing you know, it’s off in some direction you don’t need it in. It’s burning tokens (the units AI tools count and charge by), and the productivity has turned into trash and gobbledygook.
It happens in my own studio too. Back in June an AI built a screen for an app I’d designed, put its version right next to my design and couldn’t tell me what was different. I told it, “It strikes me as odd that you can put these two pictures side by side but can’t tell what the difference is.” Then I spelled it out: “You’ve got the house framed but left parts of the roof unfinished, didn’t make the doors wide enough, didn’t put finish work around the trim.” That’s what to watch for in anything AI makes for you: it gets the house framed in a hurry and skips the finish work.
It reminds me of the early days of desktop publishing and computer design, when a lot of people said, “Oh, computer design? You can recognize it from 10 miles away. It looks clunky and it’s not well done.” That’s because the tool was dictating the results. That’s exactly where we are with AI now. Your customers can spot it from 10 miles away too: the copy that sounds like everybody else’s, the picture that’s almost right.
How do you stay the sorcerer?
The tool is dictating the results, and in some cases we’re letting it. Sometimes the results are fine and sometimes they’re not. That’s when a human has to jump in and say, “No, that’s not how we’re going to do this. We’re going to do it a different way, because you don’t understand how it should be done.”
That’s art direction, and it’s still a human job. Left in charge of how the work looks, AI is a horrifying art director, because it can’t tell the difference between thoughtful refinement and clunking pieces together.
I think everybody should be using AI and focusing on how it can make their life or their work better. Here’s what I’d keep an eye on, whether you’re doing it yourself or hiring somebody who does:
- Know what good looks like before you start. If you can’t describe what you want, AI will happily make you something else.
- Put what it makes next to work you’d be proud of, and look at the finish, not the frame.
- Decide ahead of time when to stop. Throwing more AI at a mess is the apprentice’s axe. You just end up with more brooms.
- Keep somebody with taste in the room. If that isn’t you, hire somebody who has it.
I think if you look at it from that perspective, you can see how AI becomes an incredibly powerful tool, but it doesn’t completely change our lives.
I’m waiting for the next big breakthrough in AI to be common sense. Until then, you have to bring your own.
In the story, the sorcerer comes back and raises his hands, and the water drains away. Then he gives the apprentice a swat with the broom. As long as somebody in the room knows how to make the broom stop, nobody drowns. For my clients, that’s the part I do.
Published October 27, 2026. Part of the Ridpath Creative journal: notes on craft, typography, and the work.