AI without the nonsense
What AI actually means for your work, your business, and your life. Honest thinking. No hype. No doom. No jargon that makes your eyes glaze over.
WHAT I ACTUALLY THINK ABOUT AI
WHAT THIS PLACE IS
You already know AI is changing things. You don’t need another breathless LinkedIn post telling you to “adapt or die.” You don’t need a prompt pack. You don’t need someone who discovered ChatGPT eighteen months ago selling you a masterclass on setting up a profitable side-quest as a life raft to survive the chaos.
What you probably need is a place to think clearly about AI, what’s genuinely useful, what’s genuinely harmful, and what’s just noise designed to make you feel behind. Most important, perhaps, how to amplify your voice when you’re discussing AI with other pople.
That’s what this is.
Clever Clogs AI is where I publish my thinking about what AI means for people who actually have to live and work with it. Not the hype version. Not the doom version. The version where you’re trying to run a business, lead a team, or just work out which bits of this are worth your time, and which bits are worth being angry about.
I also build practical tools, toolkits, frameworks, conversation starters, for businesses that want to use AI without winging it and hoping for the best. But the tools only work if the thinking behind them is sound. So, the thinking has had to come first.
WHAT’S GOING ON WITH AI
Some of what AI can do is extraordinary. Accessibility tools that genuinely change lives. Research capabilities that save hours of real drudgery. Writing partners that help you think, not just produce words. Medical diagnostics catching patterns years before a human would spot them.
Some of it is appalling. Copyright theft on an industrial scale, dressed as innovation. Bossware snooping on staff with a view to replacing them. Data centre environmental costs in terms of water, heat, noise and energy, and shortages that get quietly buried. Confident nonsense presented as expertise. An accountability vacuum with the frontier models where “the AI did it” passes for a robust answer. it’s an entire industry built on selling urgency to people who’d be better served by clarity.
Both of those states are true at the same time and if someone’s only telling you one side, they’re pushing something.
I’m interested in the space between: the practical, honest, sometimes uncomfortable middle ground where most of us actually live and work. Where you might use AI to create an infographic one day and be furious about your talented graphic design mate who can’t get work anymore. Where you can see the genuine value and still refuse to pretend the costs don’t exist.
It’s confusing. It’s hard to know how to respond to a genuinely complicated situation. And it’s where all my work starts.
WHO’S BEHIND THIS
I’m Colette Mason. I got my first computer at 12, a little black ZX81 plugged into the family TV. I’ve been building systems ever since. Multiple investment banks, several UK government departments, London Underground, The Metropolitan Police. The kind of environments where “it crashed” is a crisis. That’s four decades sat next to a screen and counting.
I also spent six years working in usability, making software and websites user-focused, figuring out why systems fail the moment a real human touches them. Turns out the answer is almost always the same: someone designed it for how they imagined people work, not how people actually work. I’ve noticed people are tired, distracted, under pressure, sceptical, and short on time, now more than ever.
That combination, decades of building things that can’t afford to break, plus years of understanding why humans struggle with technology, is what I bring to AI.
I’m not an AI evangelist. I’m not an AI doomer. I’m the person in the room who asks “yes, but does it actually work on a Wednesday afternoon when you’re knackered and the deadline’s moved?”
I am a member of the National Association of Press Agencies (NAPA) and a contributing journalist for Newspage, covering AI adoption, ethics, the impact of big tech, and small business economics for the UK national, regional and trade press.
WHAT YOU WON’T FIND HERE
No “adapt or die” urgency. No prompt hacks. No transformation promises. No courses built on six months of experience and a lot of Wild West overconfidence. No pretending AI is all good or all bad.
What you will find: honest thinking, a ton of research, practical tools, and the space to make your own decisions about AI without being pressured, patronised, or panicked into something that doesn’t fit.