Riding The AI Wave

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If you haven't tried AI creation tools, I've got bad news.

All of your competition has experimented with AI. The big scary AI algorithms aren't coming for your jobs. AI-assisted creators are coming for your jobs and audience.

You can either use generative AI or get screwed by it. Your choice.

Are creators screwed?

If you're an SEO blog writer, you're fucked.

The purpose of SEO blogs are to rank high on Google. They don't need perspective or wit. They just need the right keywords. AI is amazing at that. Better than humans.

If you're a writer who is capable of producing high-quality content on your own, then using AI will only enhance your work. People talk about 10x engineers. You can be a 10x writer with AI. You're not screwed. In fact, quite the opposite.

AI writing apps make getting to the first draft much quicker. You'll still need to edit and iterate, but you get to the first draft without as much confusion. You can fly by the "pit of despair".

"But the pit of despair is the best part", some claim! I agree. It's where I find all the hidden truths. That's why I only use writing apps for repetitive freelance work. If I've written about topic X and get assigned another blog on topic X, then I train the AI on my first article and spit out a new one.

I use Jasper AI to accelerate my ghostwriting work. I just give a prompt and background info and it spits out a blog. While Jasper can't write at my standard, it's great for generating ideas and the occasional stellar sentence to steal.

I haven't used AI writing tools for anything Cyber Patterns related, but just for fun, I threw today's blog title into Jasper. Here's what the intro would've looked like if AI wrote it.

Eh, pretty mid, right? Not much perspective, but I appreciate The Terminator reference.

To quote Jack Raines, "My hypothesis is that low-quality content now faces an existential threat, and high-quality content is even more valuable." The SEO blogs will all be AI-written while high-quality writers will use AI as a very minor tool in their toolbox.

The same idea goes for artists and designers. The low-level Fiverr designers will get replaced while the best artists will use AI to 10x their process like a 21st century Warhol.

"But AI assistance feels wrong."

For me, writing is all about clarifying my thinking.

I thought using AI would degrade the writing process, but it doesn't. It feels more like using a thesaurus or dictionary. It's not a cheat code, but rather a tool. 

At the end of the day, AI assistance is is just assistance. Like in basketball, a good assist won't make a bad shooter a good one. You need skill.

You need style and a perspective.

What other tools are there?

Text. Art. Code. Video. Speech. All here. 3D. Music. Audio. Chemistry. All coming soon.

While I don't use AI writing tools for Cyber Patterns blogs, I use OpenAI's DALL-E 2 to create all my artwork. I just type a prompt into DALL-E 2 and use Photoshop to alter it.

No shame. I steal like an artist.

As Steven Pressfield wrote, “It ain’t stealing if you put a spin on it.” That's all the AI is doing anyways. It's putting a spin on millions of others' work. Now we get to spin that shit right back. It's a beautiful and kleptomaniacal process.

But that's what creating on the internet nowadays is.

You can tell Jasper to turn your blog into bullet points and use them for a thread. You can tell Runway to make a video for your class project. You can type in a prompt to Diagram and it'll spit out a Figma design for an app.

We're in the Generative AI Generation.

I remember as a kid being amazed when text message auto-complete started being a thing. "How did it know what we were thinking?" we'd all wonder. We're so used to auto-complete now it's no big deal.  

Current teenagers' experience of school will be so different than when I was in high school. CommonApp essay prompt too hard? Plug it into into Jasper and do some edits.

Teachers will have to either go to in-person assignments and tests or accept the fact that AI is doing much of their students' work. While the nuns will still make kids write in cursive, the techno-optimistic teachers will encourage their students to use AI because they know it'll help them in their careers.

Last week, investor and founder Elad Gil published a blog explaining how although Google was best suited to create apps like Jasper and DALL-E 2, startups beat them to it. He believes that startups will gain much of the value from this wave of AI.

Instead of using AI to tailor our Facebook ads, some of the greatest minds of our generation are working on AI apps that enhance creativity and solve problems.

This is why people are so excited about this wave of AI. We've hit an inflection point.

There's no going back. We're the Generative AI Generation.