If your job includes handing over words, pictures, reports, or any other brain output to customers, here are some things to think about as you decide what’s next.
AI came for my profession, copywriting, first. We used to think a bit, then sell the product of that or the time it took to make it. Time spent putting things on screens. Hours billed for drafts and revisions.
That’s over.
Many copywriters are already gone.
Most of the rest are simply ‘writing’ more, using AI tools.
But some are thinking more instead.
If you want to be one of the thinkers, when AI comes for your profession, here are some observations from the people who got hit early and survived.
- Today, we’re selling focused creative attention.
How?
We’re willing to sit in boredom. Everyone else is using their phone to distract them on the toilet.
We’re wading neck-deep into uncomfortable ambiguity until a solution emerges.
And we bet that our brains will come up with something that doesn’t exist yet. Something that’s never existed before in this particular form.
That’s what the market buys now. Not words. Not time.
Focused creative human attention applied to them.
- The Skills You Outsource Will Atrophy
So be strategic about what you hand over.
If you write, outsource the writing you can afford to forget how to do. The routine stuff. The formats you won’t need to master again.
Keep the writing that makes you valuable. The thinking behind the words. The ability to understand what someone needs before they know they need it.
Because once a skill atrophies, getting it back is harder than learning it the first time. You won’t have as much motivation, and what you do have is will be joined by annoyance and fear.
- Most Writing Isn’t More Valuable Because a Human Created It
Let’s be honest about this.
Some writing gains value from human creation — personal essays, company founder stories, anything where the reader cares about the person behind the words.
Most business writing doesn’t. Almost all fast-consumption writing doesn’t.
The email sequence that nurtures leads? The product descriptions that convert browsers? The social media posts that build awareness? Nobody cares if a human or AI wrote them. They care if the writing works.
- Creativity vs. Creative Thinking
Most people confuse creative thinking with creativity. So does AI.
Creative thinking is exercises and templates. It’s listing 100 names for an ice cream flavor. It’s generating ideas on demand using frameworks and formulas.
AI excels at creative thinking. People are good at it, too.
But that’s not creativity.
Creativity is insight that springs from learning and experience, in a brain given time to ruminate. It’s messy, slow, and operates on its own schedule. It can’t be summoned with a prompt.
Capture all of your insights when they come, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.
Ideas are generated. Insights have to be captured. That’s why they’re valued.
- Three Stories to Think About AI
Pick the metaphor that helps you use it best:
It’s An Alien Consciousness: It got snagged into our internet during its travels. Doesn’t know our real world, doesn’t think like us, but learned to simulate how we communicate using only what was online. Treat it like a brilliant outsider with HUGE gaps in understanding.
It’s A High-IQ Savant: Better than you’ll ever be at specific types of reasoning. Hopelessly useless at almost everything else. Ask it to sort or analyze, and it’s instant. Ask if 9.9 or 9.11 is bigger, and prepare to be surprised. And you don’t command it, you have to prompt it, like directing an actor toward something (hopefully) usable.
It’s A Self-Taught Computer Program: Homeschooled using only the internet. Knowledge that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Knows things that are false but make sense to it within its training. Unlike human-programmed apps, give it the same prompt infinite times and never get the same result twice.
- Where Humans Can Always Win
Things with friction will always need people:
Physical world interactions, especially with other people.
Weighted, interdependent decisions requiring judgment calls.
Deep, specialized experience that advances a field.
Anything involving liability.
And undefined problem spaces. When you don’t know exactly what you’re solving for, or the range of possible outcomes, or both, that’s human territory for a long time to come.
- The Content Flood Is Just Beginning
Twenty years ago, the web made distribution free. LLMs have now made production free.
This is Jevons Paradox in action. When something becomes much more efficient and cheaper, we don’t use the same amount for less. We use vastly more at the same cost as before.
Prepare for a content flood that makes today’s “information overload” look quaint.
The Real Opportunity
In this flood of AI-generated content, the writing that’s cutting through isn’t the most polished or optimized.
It’s the writing that shows human creativity, or insights, or understanding. The copy that proves someone thought deeply about a specific problem, or experienced it. The message that could only exist because a person who understands created it for the people who need it.
That’s not something you can prompt into existence.
That’s something you have to think, feel, and create your way toward.
