To AI or Not - with Holly Marsh

February 18, 2026·1 hr 8 min·5 clips

An artist spent 40 hours guiding AI to create a piece—Holly wonders if it's really saving time or just a shiny object.

AI makes Sam and Holly uneasy. The conversation opens with a half-joke about staying polite for the future cyborg overlords, then settles into a tougher question: who gets to shape this technology, and who has to live with it? The laugh has teeth. Sam is thinking from inside craft business, where tools should help artists and business owners without sanding down the people doing the work. Holly brings the same wary energy. The issue is not only speed. What bothers them is the mix of stolen labor, investor pressure, and the push to wring more output from every keystroke. Productivity starts to sound less like relief and more like another demand. The sharpest part comes when the promise of saved time meets the actual chore of tweaking, correcting, and repairing what AI spits out. That is where the pitch falls apart for them. If a creative team uses AI because management asked, then hands back weak material that humans have to fix, the shortcut has become extra work. Sam is not buying the shine. Holly lands nearby: she is not rejecting every tool on sight, but she doubts this one changes craft-business work the way its boosters say it will. Microsoft comes up as the big example. Companies ordering employees to lean into AI gives the whole thing a familiar business flavor, with adoption racing ahead of usefulness. The tone stays loose, which helps. They move through anecdotes, irritation, side comments, and returns to the same sore spot, so it feels like two colleagues working through a messy problem rather than presenting a manifesto. Remote work enters the room too. Office mandates give them a useful comparison: leadership declares efficiency, workers deal with the friction underneath. Nobody acts like certainty is available. The worry is that ordinary craft business owners do not control the direction, the incentives, or the people steering the future they are being told to accept. By the end, they let the knot loosen a little, joking about wanting a better outlook and even a different Pantone of the year before circling back to what hope might look like.

As heard by us

A skeptical, funny conversation about AI, craft labor, and the cost of chasing more productivity.

Sam Hunter and Holly Marsh spend the episode working through AI as a practical question of craft and business, keeping both the artist's concerns and the owner's realities in view.

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Why you'd press play

You want an honest craft-industry take on AI without the glossy tech pitch.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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