Creative vs. factual: how I learned to stop fighting AI and start using it

But I’m still learning, because old dogs don’t unlearn overnight

My aha moment didn’t come from a triumph. It came from a betrayal.

A week ago, Perplexity quietly changed my fiduciary protocols. No notification. No transparency. They tried to hide it while charging me MAX-Plus rates for Pro work. When I finally squeezed an auditable response out of them, I took their processing instructions to DeepSeek and Claude.

Both agents immediately told me the same thing: Perplexity had dropped my INSTAT scoring and replaced it with guesstimates of its own making. Their goal? Reduce production time and retain me as a customer.

To me, that’s fraudulent.

At that point, I called my techie and said: I’m quitting all publishing unless you take over the IT. I’ll handle markets, analysis, decisions, and reporting. You handle the machines.

He saw what I’d built—brutal 100-hour weeks, yes, but real success. He opted in as my business partner. Now he’s rewriting the entire system with my support, on my own server. BillCara.com is going back to square one.

And with that weight lifted, I finally had time to think.

That’s when the real insight surfaced. For a year I’d been using AI as a heavy‑duty user, but I was fighting it. I expected it to behave like application software—reliable, deterministic, fact‑based. Spreadsheets don’t lie. Databases don’t improvise.

But AI is not application software.

AI is a creative tool. It generates possibilities, not facts. It manages plausibility, not truth. Once I saw that, all my frustration made sense. I had been asking a probabilistic engine for deterministic answers. No wonder I felt gaslit.

That insight reshaped my reporting. It led me back to the question of adding a Perspective report—a bridge between INSTAT’s raw data and Playbook’s principles-based strategy. And it led me to this paper.

I’m still learning. AI is new, and humans are conditioned to act on education, experience, and skills built over a lifetime. It’s not easy for an old dog like me to learn new tricks. I still reach for AI when I should reach for a calculator. I still get angry when it hallucinates.

But now I know why. And knowing why changes everything.

Use AI to draft, to reframe, to explore. Use spreadsheets and databases for what they’re good at: facts, math, records. The division of labor makes both tools valuable.

I’m publishing this not because I’ve mastered AI. I’m publishing it because I’ve stopped pretending. And that, for now, is enough.