From social media posts to journal articles, many calls are being made on staff in higher education to gain, and/or improve their, ‘AI literacies’. The discourse around how higher education should be dealing with the emergence of these innovative, disruptive, and rapidly evolving technologies centre around: inevitability, in that the technology is here, students are using it, staff should, or even must, accept and engage with these technologies. Discourse also frequently acknowledges the ethical issues accompanying different AI tools, while in the same breath saying that their use is both unavoidable and desirable. Non-engagement is is now often being framed as an extreme, irresponsible position to take; individual responsibility, in that exploring and establishing ways of integrating these technologies into teaching and learning practices falls to each individual as part of their professional responsibilities; limited systemic accountability, in that the role of the institution is limited to generating policy and high level guidance, providing the typically limited degree of training and educational development in teaching and learning, and setting expectations for individual staff to develop their own capacity. The discourse on AI technologies in higher education is frequently divorced from discussions of existing institutional digital competency frameworks and related, strategic, resourced capacity building for staff and students. Most of the ideas and proposed interventions in this space are doomed to fail as they are constructed on the shaky foundations of existing, dysfunctional dynamics in higher education. I propose an alternative, radically mundane approach for how higher education staff can be positioned to be able to approach any technology, including new, innovative, and disruptive technologies, in their teaching and learning work. This approach is grounded in existing models of staff capacity building and a rejection of the nonsensical and taboo positioning of higher education staff capacity as magically infinite.