AI: Ally or Enemy? The Answer Is Up to You.
There’s a question a lot of business owners are quietly wrestling with right now: is AI something I should be using, or something I should be afraid of?
I want to give you a real answer — not a cheerleader answer, and not a doom answer. Because this week, two stories dropped that actually frame it perfectly.
The Story About the Internet’s Hidden Holes
Anthropic — the company that builds the AI I use to produce this podcast — released something called Claude Mythos Preview. They did something unusual: they didn’t release it to the public.
Here’s why. In testing, this model found thousands of high-severity security vulnerabilities across every major operating system and every major web browser. It uncovered a flaw in OpenBSD that had been hidden for 27 years. It found a bug in a video encoding tool that had survived five million automated tests without being caught. It autonomously broke into a FreeBSD server — root access, no human involved after the initial prompt.
Rather than letting that capability loose in the world, Anthropic launched Project Glasswing: a quiet collaboration with about 50 of the world’s most important technology companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, and Amazon. The mission is to find and fix the internet’s weakest points before someone with bad intentions gets there first.
That’s AI used as a shield.
The same tool, in different hands, is a weapon. That’s not a reason to be afraid of AI. It’s a reason to understand it.
The Story About the Author Whose Career Burned Down
In March 2026, a horror novel called Shy Girl was making waves. Self-published author Mia Ballard had built a real following on TikTok. Hachette — one of the world’s largest publishers — had acquired the book for release in both the UK and the US.
Then readers started noticing the writing felt off. One YouTuber spent nearly three hours dissecting it. An AI detection firm concluded that 78% of the book showed signs of AI generation. The New York Times ran the story. Hachette cancelled the deal.
Ballard’s response: she hadn’t written it with AI herself. An editor she’d hired for the original self-published version had used AI to rewrite large portions — without her knowledge. “My mental health is at an all-time low,” she wrote to the Times, “and my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do.”
Whether you believe her version or not, the lesson is the same: AI didn’t ruin her career. Deception did. And the fear and backlash that followed wasn’t really about AI — it was about trust.
For writers, editors, and artists who are worried about being replaced: your worry isn’t irrational. But the authors who are figuring this out are the ones treating AI as a collaborator — using it to draft, structure, and organize, then bringing their own voice, experience, and judgment to the final product. The human still has to be in the room.
Here’s How I Use It
I want to be specific, because vague claims about “AI saves time” aren’t useful.
Here’s my actual workflow for this show:
I start with a brain dump. I open Claude and talk. Unfiltered, out of order, whatever’s in my head. Claude organizes it into a coherent argument, finds the connective tissue, and builds a structure I can record against.
Then it fact-checks me. When I make a claim that doesn’t have evidence behind it, Claude says so — and finds something that does. That’s not a limitation. That’s a collaborator that won’t let me embarrass myself on air.
I record the episode — just me, talking. AI didn’t write my stories or my perspective.
After recording, AI handles the production: graphics copy, social captions for Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook, the blog post, the podcast summary, and the hashtags. Another tool edits my audio so I don’t sound like I’m fumbling for words. Another clips the video for short-form content.
Estimated time saved per episode: about five hours.
Five hours a week. Every week. That adds up fast.
What It Means for Your Business
Here’s the real point: AI doesn’t replace humans. What it does is bridge gaps.
Gap between idea and execution? Smaller than ever. Gap between “I want a website” and having one? Basically gone. Gap between wanting to produce content and being able to post across seven platforms without a team? Closed.
For Canadian small business owners operating without big budgets or big teams, this matters. You’ve never had access to leverage like this before. Not at this cost, and not at this scale.
Any tool, in the wrong hands, causes harm. That’s true of everything. But tools in the right hands are how species evolve. The printing press. The telephone. The internet. None of those were without risk. All of them changed everything.
You’ve been using AI for decades. Caller ID. Spam filters. Spell check. Google’s search algorithm. Netflix recommendations. You trusted it with your attention long before you were asked to trust it with your business.
The only thing standing between you and a significant competitive advantage is curiosity. Pick one thing you dread doing every week. Ask AI to do it. See what happens.
The people building the most right now aren’t the most experienced or the most funded. They’re the ones who got curious first.
