I have a new favorite word that I used to think was insulting: amateur.
(This is still a word I wouldn’t love to hear before a surgery… and if you’re telling me a piece of art looks “amateurish,” I know what you meant to say: it looks a little bit clumsy, technically not quite there yet.)
What a lot of people don’t know is that the word amateur comes from the Latin amator, which means “lover” or “devotee.”
A lover!! Suddenly, the word makes much more sense.
There was a weirdly long stretch of time between the word’s Latin meaning and its present-day meaning, during which it became the definitive description of a person who isn’t serious enough or expert enough - basically, they haven’t earned the title.
And to be fair, to go back to my initial surgery claim, we do need that distinction sometimes.
Expertise matters. Training is a real thing, too.
We should probably keep the surgeons, please…
Outside of these places - where expertise actually protects people - I think we’ve made the border much stricter than it needs to be. There are SO many things we mentally file under not my field because the distance between being interested and being able to make anything real feels ridiculous.
I would LOVE to create a complex app, but… I don’t code. Animation? Bookbinding? A digital magazine that looks more like a strange artifact than a PDF? Can I do these?
Yes please, all of them.
A lot of things tend to fascinate us in the day to day, but then we meet the giant Goliath - so giant that his belly’s full of all the things we need to do before we become “masters” at the thing, or even attempt it.
I love to think that AI makes Goliath smaller. Suddenly, the amateur who loves the thing can get close enough to try it, make something, get annoyed, learn a little more, and see if the obsession survives the week.
Hi, I’m Mia. Welcome to ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK. On this side of the world, we use AI with a brain and zero circus tricks.
Today, AI will give you permission to be an amateur again. And not be ashamed of it.
New here? Come meet the robots. And me. :)
You’ll also get free access to the RobotsOS starter library, with a few of my favorite ways to think, make, and work with AI.
Amateur wasn’t always the lesser category
In science, at least, the amateur/professional divide is newer than it feels.
For example, in 19th-century science, you could’ve been paid to do what a gentleman pursued for pleasure, and guess what, you would’ve been labeled a “professional.”
Pretty funny, considering how we reversed the status symbols just by assigning different meaning to words.
I hate romanticizing the past, and the old amateur world; obviously, not everyone had enough money and time to collect rocks and stare at the skies. But some were called “amateurs” simply because the “professional” gate was closed to them.
Historian Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie uses the phrase “obligatory amateurs” for British women astronomers who had the ability and desire to become professionals but were barred from professional status.
I’m not asking for the old social norm, but I am indeed interested in the idea of it: you can have a serious relationship with a subject without turning it into a full-time profession.
You press the button, we do the rest
Kodak’s advertising slogan, 1888.
Suddenly, people had access to a little camera and a little button; they’d just press it, and boom, they’d essentially be able to call themselves photographers.
Family photos, travel photos, random photos. They’d get obsessed and join photography clubs. Some of them would stay casual forever, while for others, huge doors would open, and they’d have the opportunity of a lifetime.
Kodak’s little button made photography available to millions of people without professional training or technical expertise. Plenty of them might never have tried it otherwise.
This is why I think AI can do something similar for us: get us through the first technical wall, far enough inside a field to start seeing it.
Why AI can get us close enough to try
Kodak removed a huge chunk of the friction that had kept a lot of people from taking photos in the first place.
AI can do the same across many other fields, and I really think it can meaningfully accelerate the process in this strange new world.
But getting close enough to try is not the same as becoming good at the thing.
Here’s a concrete example:
I want this text to fall down the webpage like snow when somebody scrolls. I don’t know what that technically means.
Robots can then translate it into technical terms and either do it for you (pretty sloppily, sometimes) or teach you how to do it yourself.
The idea is that the robot will not only get you started but will explain the new terms in your language. Maybe I can’t understand anything about JavaScript, so I’ll be glad to have an explanation in natural language.
There is some research pointing to this, too.
In a 2023 Science experiment, people doing professional writing tasks finished faster and produced higher-quality work with ChatGPT, with weaker performers benefiting more. A 2026 NBER experiment found AI closed a large part of an education-based performance gap during a business problem-solving task.
During…
When the AI went away in that NBER study, a sizeable gap came back.
And in a randomized programming study, students with AI performed way better on the exercise itself without showing bigger gains in underlying knowledge or code comprehension afterwards.
So yes, the first attempt can come sooner without us needing to automatically and magically extract the entire field into our brains. We love a useful boundary!
Here’s your permission to attempt doing the thing you keep saying you have no idea how to make
Go into it with an open mind, and zero pressure. Pick the smallest thing you’ve tucked into your “not my profession” drawer and create the smallest version of it.
Have AI help you through the parts that’d otherwise scare you and stop you at the door, whether that means translating technical terms or showing you what people in the field pay attention to when they choose colors, shape a page, or decide whether a piece of text is working.
You don’t need to announce your new “job” on LinkedIn, but rather come out of the experiment with a new object in front of you and a few new things you know how to notice.
Borrow the field’s eyes
Good, you’ve built a first iteration, even if at concept-level only.
Now, instead of falling into the temptation of moving fast and asking AI how to improve this thing, ask what people who are great at it notice in their work that you don’t.
What are you blind to because you’re just a beginner?
What language do these people use when they speak about “quality?”
Ask for examples, and then go and actually look at them. This is a critical human step, as robots can’t do this job for you - they can analyze through an AI’s lens, but you’ll want to use your brain and your own eyes to absorb meaning and taste.
And this is where being an amateur gets good, because you’ll have new things to notice.
Recreate one tiny thing you love
Pick one tiny part of something you love and ask your AI assistant to help you take it apart from all sides. Find the hidden decisions, which bit is too technical, and what you’d need to understand to make a small version of it yourself.
And then recreate that tiny piece. That’s ✨studying✨
And it’s a great way to learn new stuff.
Simply admiring something is extremely vague; you can stare at pretty projects the way you stare at art in museums, and still have no idea what it is you like about them.
But rebuilding just 4% of it tends to give you OPINIONS. You find bits that were easy, and bits that were absolutely not.
And suddenly, a possible new hobby might just have been born!
Let somebody better than you annoy you a little
Show your work to one informed person and compare it with a few strong references. Notice what doesn’t hold up, but don’t go back and revise it endlessly.
Give yourself permission to revise it only once.
(I’m saying this because with AI, it’s super tempting to just prompt it “Make this better.”)
And then, naturally, you’ll end up arriving at my favorite experiment:
Do you want to spend another week on this?
Maybe not.
Maybe you hate it, in which case that’s excellent information - much better to find out early. Or you wake up wanting to fix it, start saving good examples, notice more details, come back with better questions.
You might even know enough, for the first time, to reject an AI suggestion because it makes things worse.
You don’t have to become professional or even good at it. This practice can simply become part of your life.
We’ve asked so much about what AI does to jobs, but we rarely ask what it does to things we do when nobody pays us.
What can you TRY, because the technical wall got shorter? What subject can you understand from the inside? What can you make badly and then improve?
If you want more ideas to think with and strange things to try with AI, there’s plenty more where this came from.
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Maybe AI gets you through the annoying first door; what happens after that is way more interesting.
To being amateurs,
Mia Kiraki
Amator: lover. Brilliant. I believe that when something struggles, we should change its placement, not its nature. "Amateur" is that same story in a smaller coat. For centuries we called people lesser when they'd only been barred from the gate. Your Kodak button and my herb garden make the same case: what stands between us and the doing is access.
What I'd add from where I sit is that AI shrinks Goliath most for the minds the professional track was never built to hold, since the credential slog filters out exactly the people who'd have loved the work fastest. And your real test is the perfect one. Not "am I good at this" but "does the obsession survive the week?" Consider me a devotee. 🌿
I feel like AI can make it much easier to try new things. We can use it to explore and experiment, and if we create something that’s only interesting or useful to us, that’s good enough! It’s also fun to be an amateur because it means we have more things to discover.