Gear talk is a religion for people who fear taste. I say this with love, as someone who has absolutely worshipped at the altar of a new lens, convinced it would grant me absolution.
The new sensor will not fix your indecision. The flagship body will not supply a point of view. It will only render your mediocrity in higher resolution. This is the cruel gift of modern imaging: it removes excuses. If your frame is boring, it will now be boring with exquisite detail.
The old artists made worlds without a spec sheet. Man Ray didn't wait for the perfect camera to invent a new visual language. Avedon didn't need "more dynamic range" to expose a human being. What they needed—what they possessed—was nerve. A point of view sharp enough to cut.
AI intensifies the gear delusion in a new way. Now your mistakes can be "perfected." Focus can be nudged. Skin can be rewritten. Backgrounds can be replaced. Suddenly the image looks technically flawless, and you start mistaking flawlessness for meaning. That's how you end up as a technician of prettiness instead of an author of intent.
Here's a better way to think about tools: your camera is a translator. It translates your decisions into a visual artifact. A better translator can help, but it cannot invent what you meant. If your sentence is empty, the translation will still be empty—just grammatically elegant.
So buy good tools. Respect craft. Enjoy the toys. But understand the hierarchy: taste first, discipline second, gear third. And then—only then—AI as augmentation. AI should serve your spine, not replace it.
Because the audience doesn't care what you shot on. They care whether the image had desire.