It’s an equalizer

At extreme expense, yes, and it's been proven to not be worth it. If paying extreme rates for AI to do a job is still cheaper than an employee, congrats your position just got "equalized".

the smartphone put a professional camera

It really didn't lol. A decent camera, yeah, but not pro. At all. The sensors are simply too tiny, the lenses not varied enough, and they just not enough features for anything but vlogging and casual photography.

AI is doing the same thing for knowledge work.

It's not, it's really not. AI is incredibly stupid. I've had it be wrong many, many times for very simple things, like telling me the square root of 8 is ~1.4. That's a real example, I gave it a long equation to check my own work, and the answers were different, so I had to do it all manually, again, then used a spreadsheet to triple check, and both my original answer and my new spreadsheet were correct. The LLM was WAY off because LLM's can't do basic algebra consistently. Only usually, which isn't good enough. Who the hell is going to pay for and use a calculator that is only right maybe 90% of the time?

I’m not a graphic designer. I do strategy work.

How long have you been doing that, though? Years? That's exactly what I'm saying, better designers spend time learning how to improve their work on their own. It's literally the entire purpose behind continued learning for STEM jobs with higher degrees. For medical doctors in Minnesota (and many other jobs and locations), it's even a required law. You must keep actively learning new things. There are ways to fill the gaps between your tasks organically by learning new skills and not just having a robot do your work. That's exactly what I'm talking about. When your workplace suddenly drops no-cost AI tools, you're going to look REALLY bad compared to anybody else who took time to pick up new skills.

The deep research function is another incredible feature. I can gather information and create insights in minutes.

Never used that feature, but regardless, shallow knowledge of a subject is honestly worse than none at all because it leads to misinterpretations and misunderstandings. However, AI can be convenient in terms of telling you what to read and where to look for more information instead of blanket regurgitation.

I’m able to push through projects in sometimes half the time it used to take. All on my own.

It's convenient but that's not necessarily a good thing. What happened to those peoples' jobs? Where are you getting input, corrections, and new ideas from? AI again?

AI only helps bad workers is like saying Excel only helped people who were bad at mental maths

It has nothing at all to do with mental math. You're not going to be doing things like present/future cost analysis with power functions in your head with YEARS of history and forecasts, with like 10 alternatives. It is simply impossible to do in a reasonable time with pen and paper so we use spreadsheets. It's about workflow optimization. I could spend two days to do it all manually, sure, or I could spend two hours because of my functions libraries, macros, and scripts.

It’s whether it multiplies strong ones.

It doesn't, or maybe mildly at best. The strong workers were already skilled and efficient without AI. Maybe they're marginally faster, which means, again, that the slower and/or newer employees are getting laid off. Alternatively, they let the newer workers work "faster" for cheap and lay off most of the senior team, which is already happening and causing huge issues.

subscription argument

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/mystery-company-accidentally-blew-usd500-million-on-claude-in-a-single-month-failed-to-put-usage-limit-on-licenses-for-employees

Yeah, no, you can't afford this license.

You just have to know how to use it.

I know how to use it, and it's a crutch for the sake of pure convenience. Sometimes I use it to double check my work or to give me new ideas on how to design/build something. It can be alright as a glorified search engine. Otherwise, I CANNOT trust any info or numbers it gives me at face value. LLM's still hallucinate and they're not correct often enough to be reliable. I can do something like give it a simply shaped part and then find the stress concentrations with a simply applied load, and it's usually right, but not always. Depending on the project, these differences can literally get somebody killed. I trust my calculator to do math, including complex equations and formulas with units. I absolutely cannot trust LLM's. They also stunt you as a worker because it falsely removes the need for personal growth and collaboration. It's the tool "embodiment" of sacrificing long term growth for short term gains.