You would be foolish to completely avoid AI, but you are also right to be careful. AI is best used for boring stuff that's non-critical, and for stopping you from having to reinvent the wheel.

For example for a game, you could use AI to finish a sprite sheet based on a couple frames you provide, or to give you a pathfinding algorithm.

AI is a resource, and a startup has a better chance of success the better it leverages the few resources it has.

Thanks for the perspective! I tend to consult ChatGPT with high-level queries as a replacement for Google, and I get a lot of mileage out of combining that with plenty of good old documentation-reading.