THE NOISE

Why AI Expert Is Starting to Sound Like a Red Flag

2026-09-19

Somewhere in the last two years, AI expert quietly stopped meaning what it used to. It used to signal years of specialized work. Now it mostly shows up on a profile belonging to someone who started experimenting with ChatGPT around the same time everyone else did, and decided the label fit better than enthusiast.

That's not really their fault. The field moves fast enough that the gap between knows more than you and has done this for years has basically collapsed. Someone who's spent three focused months testing tools genuinely can know more than someone who's spent three years half-paying attention. Depth of engagement matters more than tenure right now, in a way it didn't in most fields.

But that also means the credential is broken. A title that used to filter for expertise now filters for confidence, and those aren't the same thing. The most dangerous voices in this space aren't the ones admitting uncertainty. They're the ones who've decided that six weeks of trying tools qualifies them to tell you definitively which one is best, with no caveats, no depends-on-your-use-case, no I-haven't-tested-this-at-scale.

We'd rather be the second kind of voice. Not because false modesty sells better, but because it's actually true: nobody, including us, has this fully figured out. New models ship monthly. What was true about a tool in June can be false by September. The honest position isn't I don't know anything, it's here's what I've actually tested, here's what I haven't, and here's where I'm genuinely unsure.

That distinction is the whole reason this site exists. Not to claim expertise we don't have, but to be clear about the difference between what we've verified and what we're guessing at.