The One Where AI Can't Steal Your Joy with Jon Cheney

I don't think there's a day that goes by right now where someone isn't talking about AI.

You're already using it, whether you realize it or not.

That's the first thing Jon Cheney told me when we sat down for this episode. Jon is the founder and CEO of the General AI Proficiency Institute, and he's spent his career building and selling tech companies, teaching AI for business on stages across the country, and maybe most impressively - building an entire business in a single weekend.

More on that in a minute.

AI Is Already In Your Camera Roll

Here's the thing Jon pointed out that stuck with me: if you've ever wondered why your iPhone photos just look so good, that's AI already doing its job in the background. Blending exposures, adjusting depth, cleaning things up. If you're someone who says "I don't do AI," you probably already are.

That reframe alone made this whole topic feel a lot less scary.

The Editing Fixes Nobody Talks About

We talked a lot about the small, practical stuff. Jon told a story about framing a gorgeous shot in Alaska, handing his camera to a guide, and getting back a photo where the framing was totally off. Instead of tossing it, he combined his original framing with the photo of his group and had AI realign the whole thing.

I told him about a senior session I shot where wind was wrecking every photo, so I picked a spot with a tree that ended up looking like it was growing out of my client's head. My plan the whole time was: deal with the tree later. That's the kind of fix AI is genuinely great for — cars in the background, stray branches, tan lines, blemishes. Things that used to mean hours of cloning in Photoshop now take a circle and a click.

How Jon Built a $3.2 Million Business in a Weekend

The big takeaway from this whole conversation: Jon estimated that the business he built — full website, content, systems, everything would have taken 18 months and $3.2 million to build the traditional way, hiring developers and a team. He built it in three days for $400 using a tool called Replit, and had his first $15,000 client within a couple of days of launching.

He wasn't selling us on the tool, though I will say, I'm curious to try it myself. His bigger point was about mindset: you don't need to know how to code, you just need to be able to describe what you want. He compared it to being the director and producer of your own ideas, rather than handing AI the whole project and just saying "yeah, sounds good" the whole time.

Why Creativity Is Something AI Can Never Take

This is the part that really got me. Jon talked about the difference between the joy of creating something and what he calls "stewardship" - what you do with it afterward. Sharing it, getting feedback, improving, showing up again. He made the case that no matter how good AI gets at producing an image, it can never feel that. That part stays entirely human.

He also brought up something worth sitting with: different AI platforms are trained on different data and can give you genuinely different answers to the same question, especially on anything opinion-based. Knowing that matters if you're using AI to inform decisions in your business, not just to edit a photo.

If you want to go deeper, Jon offers a course called "How to Build a Business in a Weekend" — use code KATE for $350 off at GenAIPI.org.

Happy listening,
Kate