The Right Way To Write With AI

The value and ownership of writing in a world of infinite text-based Commodity Content.

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Dear Writer,

Just because you wrote it doesn’t mean you own it.

Language is an open-source operating system for communication. Words and sentences are like lines of code. No one owns, or is known for any individual word or letter. No one owns the letter “C” and no one owns the word “Catastrophe.” No one owns the name “Cole!” There are many people in the world named Cole. So despite these four letters, combined into a word, acting as my name representing my human identity, I do not own the name Cole. And if I write, “My name is Cole,” and someone else writes, “My name is Cole,” he is not plagiarizing me and I am not plagiarizing him. (Which is why we are all assigned Social Security Numbers.)

No person, or company, or government owns the alphabet. Nor do they own the vast majority of the words created from that alphabet. Nor do they own the vast majority of the sentences we speak and write that are strings of the open-source words derived from our open-source alphabet. The same is true for software. No one owns the line of code responsible for processing a payment, or changing the background color of a webpage.

So, where does ownership come from?

How do you know when something you’ve written, or said, or thought, is yours?

Commodity Content

An uncomfortable truth the world is unconsciously grappling with in the age of AI is that most words and groupings of words derived from our shared language are Commodities.

When I started ghostwriting for Silicon Valley founders and C-level executes back in 2016, this is the vocabulary I would use. It was common for me to have two clients in the same industry (say “Marketing”) and for both clients on their respective content calls to say, “The key to marketing is knowing your customer.” But this sentence is Commodity Content. A world-renowned expert could say it, or a 22-year-old on Instagram could say it. As a result, this idea, expressed through this grouping of 8 words, derived from our open-source operating system for communication, the English language, possesses very little value. Not because the idea itself is bad, or unhelpful. But because it has no ownership, no unique association. Those 8 words are not identifiable to any one individual.

AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are Commodity Content Machines.

When people point to a piece of writing and call it “AI Slop,” what they are identifying (or trying to identify) is Commodity Content.

For example, when AI writes a newsletter about “How To Lose Weight,” the majority of the words and sentences and ideas on that topic are Commodities.

• “Track your food.”

• “Count your calories.”

• “Be sure to eat healthy.”

• “Prioritize going to the gym.”

That’s not to say these words and sentences and ideas have no (as in zero) value. Commodity Content in every industry has some value, especially for beginners. If you are brand new to the concept of losing weight and eating healthy, maybe you need to hear someone tell you, “The key to losing weight is to eat healthy.”

The reason this type of content now gets flagged as AI (either artificially with AI-detection software, or publicly by mobs of people trying to delineate between man and machine) is because a Commodity is something that is easily replicable. If you take that newsletter and cover the author’s name at the top, you have no way of knowing whose it is. You also have no way of knowing whether it was written by a human or a robot.

The rise of AI means the fall of Commodity Content.

The next uncomfortable truth the world is grappling with, specifically writers across a wide-ranging spectrum of jobs and skillsets, is that Large Language Models are superior Commodity Content Machines.

I remember when I first started freelance writing in 2014. I was 24 years old, a year out of college, looking to make some extra money. A travel agency hired me to write 600-word SEO-optimized blog posts about popular hotels and restaurants in Chicago, Milwaukee, Ann Arbor, and other cities in the Midwest. I was paid $20 per blog post. At the time, I couldn’t understand why I was being paid so little. Those blog posts took work! They took effort! They took time! I didn’t know anything about these cities, hotels, or restaurants, so I had to look them up online, consume other people’s Commodity Content (blog posts written by other Commodity Writers), and then rewrite their words into something “new.”

Now, AI can do all of that work in 1/1000th of the time, with zero effort, for $20 per month—and in some cases, $0 per month.

This is disturbing for many people. And if I was a 24-year-old today, freshly graduated from college and thrown into the working-world, I imagine I would have a hard time reconciling my competition no longer being exclusively my peers (who went to superior schools, no doubt), but also hyper-fluent Commodity Content Machines. Finding a job, particularly an entry-level one to learn and build real-world experience, would be the equivalent of entering a chess competition and not knowing whether you should prepare to battle another human (a fellow student of the craft), or a supercomputer.

But the truth is, the declining trend of Commodity Content is nothing new. Commodity Content—keyword-stuffed, SEO-optimized blog posts; generalized How-To advice; technical walkthrough guides; medical questions & answers; etc.—has always been the least valued form of writing, and rightfully so. It requires the least amount of original thinking, the least amount of personality, and the least amount of skill. To write about topics I knew nothing about (like hotels and restaurants I couldn’t afford to visit in my early-20s), I would often read other people’s work online and repeat the same Commodity Ideas (otherwise known as “conventional wisdom”) but just swap groupings of words, trade adjectives, or accentuate the “voice” with colorful verbs and strategically placed adverbs. For example, I might take someone’s else’s Commodity Sentence—”If you want a fun night on the town in River North, Chicago, check out Osteria Via Stato.”—and repeat the same Commodity Idea in a “new,” slightly different way: “If you want to have some fun in River North, Chicago, and love Italian food, I recommend Osteria Via Stato.”

Which is precisely what Large Language Models do today, writing infinite Commodity Content out of open-source, unowned, non-specific language.

Just because you wrote it, meaning your fingers literally typed those words in that order, doesn’t mean those words are unique or different or yours.

You don’t own Commodity Content.

Personality Content

The rise of AI does not mean the fall of all content, and certainly not the skill of writing.

The rise of AI means the fall of Commodity Content, forcing writers and creators and thinkers across every industry to elevate out of the lowest-leverage, lowest-value form of writing.

You cannot compete with Large Language Models on Commodity Content.

• You cannot write Commodity Content better than AI, because AI has access to infinite information and you do not.

• You cannot write Commodity Content faster than AI, because AI can process and produce information at 70% the speed of light, whereas you are bottlenecked by the speed of your human brain connected to your human fingers (or voice).

• You cannot write Commodity Content cheaper than AI, because AI can work every minute of every day without stopping, whereas you cannot.

So, as the saying goes, “If you can't win the game, play a different game.”

Personality Content is the context that surrounds Commodity Content and gives Commodity Ideas increased (or decreased) perceived value. If Commodity Content is the “what” or “how,” then Personality Content is the “why.” It is the writer, creator, speaker, thinker, revealing personal details about who they are, how they learned what they’ve learned, and why they possess the opinions and beliefs and perspectives they do—which, in turn, amplifies the meaning and perceived value of their Commodity Ideas, and the Commodity Content that is fundamental to every topic and industry.

For example, you are more likely to heed the advice, “Don’t trade stocks with leverage, just buy the S&P 500 and hold for a decade” when it’s said by a certified financial advisor rather than a 23-year-old so-called day-trader on TikTok. Not because this is a differentiated insight (it’s not, many people have said it with varying degrees of credibility), but because of the context that surrounds the advice. Your credibility, your personal experience, your Personality is that context.

But, you are even more likely to heed this Commodity Advice when the financial advisor adds even more personal experience, more context, and Personality to their writing. This means going beyond their implied credibility (“a financial advisor wrote this”). For example, they might say, “Don’t trade stocks with leverage. This is a mistake I made when I was in my early-20s on Wall Street, before I went bald from stress. The most reliable way to build wealth is to just buy the S&P 500 and hold for a decade.” If you look closely, you will see the Commodity Content (the advice itself) remains unchanged. What has changed, and what makes the “content” more compelling is that it is now surrounded by Personality Content (we know this financial advisor is speaking from experience because he is admitting he has gone bald from stress). And the more Personality Content we add—the more stories, specific details, and deliberately chosen vocabulary—the more differentiated the whole piece of writing becomes (Commodity Content + Personality Content). So much so, that when pushed far enough, a strong piece of Personality Content by someone less credible can oftentimes outperform, command more attention, and be more enjoyable to read than a piece of Commodity Content by someone with immense credibility and no Personality. Scroll any social platform or major publication and you will see that more-personal Commodity Content almost always outperforms less-personal Commodity Content, meaning the details shared in the writing matter more than even the credibility of the author. And with the rise of AI, and the fall of Commodity Content, we should expect this divergence to not only continue, but accelerate.

Personality Content holds more “value” than Commodity Content because it is harder to replicate. The vast majority of human beings have not taken the time to write down or articulate out loud how they became themselves. They have not built a library of their life experiences: stories from their most formative experiences, mistakes made, lessons learned, etc. Which is why, when the average person uses AI, and AI hands them back a social post or newsletter or book chapter made of Commodity Content without any Personality Content to differentiate it, they call it “Slop.” They don’t see themselves in it. But how could they? AI is a Content Commodity Machine. It does not know you. And you, the human, have not taken the time to build your own library of human-generated Personality Content for it to leverage.

So what is the value of writing in a world of infinite text-based Commodity Content?

It’s writing the things AI cannot—not from a lack of skill, but a lack of context.

This library of Personality Content is your Personal Language Model.

I have been preaching this idea for nearly two decades, but in the age of AI it is more relevant than ever.

The most valuable asset you can build for your life and career in the digital age is a library of Personality Content on the Internet. This is how you “scale yourself” out of the unscalable real world and into the infinitely scalable digital world. Instead of sharing one story with one person over one coffee meeting, and the same story with another person over another coffee meeting, you can simply write the story or insight or perspective once and share it with infinite people online across infinite “digital coffee meetings” online.

Over time, this library of Personality Content becomes an open-source Digital Brain for other people to access without needing your direct involvement—one of the highest-forms of leverage. Your Digital Brain is unconstrained by geography, time, and the laws of physics, allowing you to communicate asynchronously with anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time.

You should think of this Digital Brain as a repository of human-generated content—written or voiced—that captures non-commodity variables:

• Life Facts: There are facts about your life no technology or Large Language Model has access to unless documented somewhere. Where did you grow up? How many siblings do you have? What did you study in school? What hobbies have you had over the course of your life? These facts might seem value-less to you, but in a world of infinite text-based Commodity Content, they become meaningful differentiators and signals of ownership. There will be very few, if any, other humans whose cumulative life facts are identical to your own.

• Opinions: What do you feel strongly about? What Commodity Content, in the context of your life, career, or chosen industry, do you agree with or disagree with? If you were going to argue with someone over something, what would you argue about? What would be your stance? Opinions themselves are often Commodities (“I think stealing is bad”), but what is unique to your Personality is which opinions you claim as your own through intentional association (which AI does not know, and cannot know without your involvement).

• Insights: After ghostwriting for 300+ industry leaders, I can tell you from first-hand experience that most “insights” people have are Commodity Insights. “The key to leadership is to lead by example.” This is an example of a Commodity Insight. There is still value in Commodity Insights, especially for the masses and beginners new to an area of interest or industry. But what gives Commodity Insights “value” is your Personality—the examples and context you provide to add color.

• Stories: What have you experienced in your life? What happened? Where were you? How old were you? Who were you with? What did you hope would happen, and what happened instead? Each of us is an accumulation of stories, big and small, that can and should play a meaningful role in our digital lives (our Digital Brains, our Content Libraries, and ultimately our Personal Language Models), the same way they do in our real lives. But it is unreasonable for these stories, arguably the most important variables in our identities, to make their way into our leveraged-digital-selves if we do not take the time to articulate them in the first place. This is the modern-day, real-time equivalent of a grandparent passing before their son, daughter, grandson or granddaughter has the chance to interview them and accurately preserve their life. You must be that scribe for yourself.

• Lessons: And what have you learned? Every life experience forces us to grow in some way, and then we take those lessons and apply them to the next chapter of life, and so on. This is, fundamentally, the value of language—written or voiced. It is to entertain (through story), and to educate (through lessons), passed along from generation to generation.

These non-commodity variables are what make you and your writing “different.” And the more of these variables (or “personal details”) that exist inside your library of Content, the more unique your writing and the more differentiated your Digital Brain.

To make this explicit, imagine two people both write articles about how to cook eggs. The Commodity Content of this topic is universal and somewhat unavoidable: use a pan, add oil, cook, flip, eat. It is unlikely either writer will stray very far from these Commodity Ideas or Steps.

But then imagine both writers add some Personality Content, and both share they are single parents. That is one new data point, a new Personality Variable that instantly differentiates their writing from every other person writing about that same topic. But it is still only one data point, and surely there are many men, who are single parents, who write (or have written, or will one day will write) about how to cook eggs.

So next imagine one of the single dads writes about how they have a son, and the other writes about how they have a daughter. And the first dad tells a story about how he cooks eggs for his son every morning before school, and the second dad tells a story about how he cooks eggs for his daughter every day as an after-school snack. You can see how, with each new Personality Variable that gets added, each person’s writing becomes more specific to them, and more differentiated and unique relative to “the other.”

Differentiation, particularly when it comes to something as shared as language, very rarely, if ever, comes from a singular data point or lone variable—unless you have lived a one-of-one experience shared by no one else: the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong; the first African American First Lady, Michelle Obama; etc. Only that person can write the words, “I was the first man on the moon” or “I was the first African American First Lady,” which fundamentally makes those 8 words the opposite of a commodity, and very hard to replicate without lying. When AI does this, we call it “hallucinating.”

But for the rest of us, and the masses who have not achieved a one-of-one outcome, differentiation and more importantly, “ownership,” comes through the cumulative collection of our Personality Details—some of which may be shared, some not, but all together amount to a new combination. Music is a helpful analogy here. No composer owns any individual key on the piano, or even Commodity Combinations of keys (scales, chords, ornamentations, etc.). But the longer each grouping of keys, forming distinctive melodies, and the more groupings and melodies in a piece, the more its cumulative whole is seen as different and associated with that individual composer—in turn, creating ownership.

Personal Leverage

The everyday person takes pride in the idea that a piece of writing is “theirs” when they are the one who physically writes it. And they shouldn’t.

As someone who has gone through the effort of writing and rewriting the same stories and insights and lessons and mistakes, manually, a thousand times in my chosen niche and topic (digital writing), I can tell you there is no nobility in repeating yourself. I shouldn’t have to be the one to rewrite the same story when I have already written that story ten times in ten different ways. And I sure as hell shouldn’t be the one to rewrite the same Commodity Content in my industry when I have already written a hundred different versions of that Commodity Content in slightly different groupings of words in slightly different orders. I should have a machine do the “repeating” for me, so that I can focus on writing the next net-new story, sharing the next net-new perspective, crystallizing the next net-new insight, further building my Personal Language Model and scaling my Digital Brain.

This is the higher-leverage, more creative work to be done.

But this is a painful paradigm shift for many, because it means divorcing effort from outcome, and activity from ownership. Just because you took the time to write it doesn’t mean you spent time writing the right thing (you didn’t add anything “new” to your Digital Brain); just because you had to “think” doesn’t mean you produced any net-new thinking; and just because you physically wrote the words with your hands doesn’t mean the majority of the words you wrote are yours—unique and associated with you and only you.

If you agree language is an open-source operating system for communication, and no one owns individual letters or Commodity groupings of words, then you should also agree it is inefficient and unnecessary for you to write anything that is not contributing to the cumulative and compounding value of your Digital Brain.

Which can be summarized by the creation of three simple assets:

• Chosen Commodity Content: Of all the Commodity Ideas in your chosen industry, niche, or topic, which ones do you want to be associated with the most? Which ones do you believe are important to repeat? Commodity Content is infinite, which means the unique component is to decide which ideas you want attached to your identity. So if you’re going to write Commodity Content of any kind, meaning you are going to take the time to “add it to your Digital Brain,” the purpose of writing and re-writing Commodity Content should be to “train your brain” on your chosen ideas and identity. A simple example would be: “If you want to save money, skip buying your morning coffee” vs “Skipping buying your morning coffee might save you a few dollars, but won’t make you rich.” Both of these are Commodity Ideas in the world of personal finance, but hold two completely different points of view. So, which one do you agree with? Which one is a reflection of your identity and how you see the world? That is the value of writing, rewriting, and choosing the Commodity Content inside your Digital Brain.

• Personality Content: Anything that is specific to you and your individual life experience is a non-commodity variable—which means it holds increased value and differentiation. The more Personality Content you write, the more Personality Variables exist within your Digital Brain, the more of “you” can be scaled and shared in the digital world. The cumulative value of all these Personality Variables is the creation of your Personal Language Model, which is how you build differentiated leverage in the AI age of infinite text-based Commodity Content.

• Original Content: You cannot learn how to create truly Original Content by being a tourist of many topics. You can only discover, and ultimately share differentiated, unique, and “owned” ideas through a deep commitment to thinking, and then crystallizing that thinking by writing, in a small number of niches over a prolonged period of time. Those who do are rewarded disproportionally. They become “thought leaders” of their respective topic(s), capturing the most and most lucrative opportunities.

In the age of AI, your goal is to spend the least amount of time writing Commodity Content, and the majority of your time writing Personality Content, so that one day (after many years of thinking deeply and writing obsessively about a small number of topics) you might produce some truly Original Content—thoughts that haven’t been thought before.

That’s not to say you can’t, or shouldn’t write Commodity Content. I do all the time. There is value in repeating Commodity Ideas in your chosen niche for categorical association (becoming known for a niche you own); there is value in reminding readers of Commodity Ideas (particularly beginners); and there is value in writing and re-writing Commodity Ideas yourself for your own learning, and to build your Personal Language Model with many different variations of how you write and speak about these Commodity Ideas.

But at a certain point, you will cross a threshold of diminishing returns.

Each net-new, slightly different variation of the same Commodity Content will produce incremental learnings (you are no longer clarifying your thinking as you write, you are repeating things you have already thought about and know), and incremental leverage (you are not adding anything new to your Digital Brain). And since time is finite, your pride—being the one to manually type words you’ve already said in groupings nearly identical to the groupings in which you’ve already said them—throttles your creative potential.

When people say AI will unleash a wave of abundance in society, across every industry, I believe this is the hope: that we will forgo the pride we have as humans to “do everything ourselves,” and more closely examine what is worth doing in the first place.

And in the case of writing, Commodity Content past a certain point is not worth writing yourself.

Because it was never really yours to begin with.

Your Writing Voice

So, where does your “voice” fall into all of this?

There is a misconception that when you write something, the mere fact “you” wrote it (as in, your fingers typed the keys) means it is in your voice—and that is not true.

Commodity Content has a universal Commodity Voice.

For example, who said this sentence?

“I woke up, made myself a cup of coffee, and got to work.”

It should be obvious this sentence cannot be attributed to any individual person. That’s because there is nothing identifiable about it—neither from its content (what it’s saying) or its “style” (how it’s being said). And yet, the vast majority of people would like to believe that when they write these 13 words (as in, their fingers click-clack on their keys), not only are the words “theirs,” but they are in “their voice.”

But ask the average person to articulate what makes their voice “their voice,” and what you will often receive back is a word salad of bundled, non-specific terms and phrases:

• “It sounds like me.”

• “It’s to the point.”

• “It’s clean. I like it.”

• “That’s how I would say it.”

• “Because I wrote it!”

But none of these are correct.

Your voice is not what you think it is.

“Voice” is a term we use to represent 3 smaller variables that show up in our writing and speech:

1. Vocabulary: Your voice changes depending on whether you say, “cool” vs “exquisite” vs “dope.” That’s because vocabulary is a reflection of your identity, and sends all kinds of signals to readers and listeners about who you are and how you see the world. For example: choosing academic words over conversational words, or saying “Chi-Town” instead of “Chicago” in a sentence. These vocabulary choices often have little impact on the sentence’s meaning, but do change your perception of the writer or speaker’s identity—adding unspoken layers of communication.

2. Rhythm: Your voice also changes depending on the cadence of your speech patterns. William Faulkner notoriously wrote in long, verbose sentences, whereas Ernest Hemingway more favorably wrote in short, terse sentences. Rhythm is the combination of sentence length, punctuation placement, and vocabulary—the three together creating what is known as “tone.”

3. EDAN: Explanation, Description, Action, Narration. What is the purpose of your writing? Better yet, what is the purpose of each individual sentence? Your voice is not a static decision. Your voice can change sentence by sentence. Are you someone who likes to Explain (tell)? Do you prefer to Describe (show)? Do you speak in Action? Or do you hypothesize in Narration? Voice is the combination of what you say (content) and how you say it (style).

As a result, you do not “find” your voice (as many people would like to believe, forever on a quest of linguistic enlightenment).

You create your voice—the same way a painter creates new colors through different combinations of Red, Green, and Blue.

AI writes in a Commodity Content Voice.

It’s not that it’s wrong, and it’s not that it’s “AI Slop.”

It’s simply Commodity Content written without any Personality Content, resulting in a Commodity Voice.

The same way you cannot expect AI to write non-Commodity Content without a library of Personality Content to pull from (your Personal Language Model), you cannot expect AI to write in a non-Commodity Voice when you haven't written in a non-Commodity Voice yourself (and then stored that writing inside your Digital Brain). That’s not to say you must learn to joust a pen like Jane Austen, but you should at least have some baseline awareness around the qualities of your distinctive voice should you ever hope to recreate it—either yourself, manually, or with the help of a robot, automatically.

That said, I have been teaching writing for over a decade. I have helped tens of thousands of people start writing online. And I find this fixation of voice in the writing world to be utterly unproductive. Just because “you” wrote it does not mean it has a voice. And just because a sentence has a Commodity Voice does not mean it’s bad—or worse, is “AI Slop.”

Commodity Ideas and Commodity Sentences are somewhat unavoidable across every industry and topic. There are only so many ways you can say the same Commodity Thing—just like, no matter how creative you get with dynamics and ornamentation, there are only so many ways to play a scale on the piano or film a scene of a movie. Voice is a minority element, and a much harder variable for differentiation.

The everyday person would be much better off acquiring unique life experiences (non-Commodity Content), and then writing about those unique life experiences (Personality Content).

Original Content

You should think of each new piece of human-generated Personality Content as an investment in the ultimate compounding vehicle: your Personal Language Model.

And when is your Personal Language Model complete? When you are finished living. As long as you are alive, you are accumulating new experiences and perspectives and learnings. But to properly leverage them, it is your responsibility to build the skill of articulating them in the first place. Because, as I say often in our writing programs: “You can’t automate what you can’t articulate.”

Those who fail to commit to this process, and do not prioritize taking the time to write “how they became themselves” in the form of Personality Content will be at a severe disadvantage in the digital world. They will have no Digital Brain! They will have failed to transform their human-lived experiences into a Personal Language Model—one of the only data sets AI companies and Large Language Models do not have and cannot easily create. As a result, and as AI continues to get smarter and faster and more capable at producing higher-grade Commodity Content across a wider number of industries and topics, these Digital Brain-less humans will extract the least amount of value from these new technologies. They will not have built the skill (maybe one of the only remaining and necessary skills) of articulating and crystallizing “how they became themselves.” As a result, and as AI technology adoption accelerates, the everyday Digital Brain-less person will continue to create both “Human Slop” and “AI Slop,” causing them to sound like everyone else—a mime to the machine, the cognitive equivalent of a teenager lip-syncing to someone else’s song on TikTok.

Which is why, as we embark into this next era of Writing With AI (not “writing without AI” in technocrat rebellion, or “letting AI write everything for me” in a pursuit of some cyberpunk delusionaltopia), I am on a mission to educate the world on the right way to write with this new technology. This requires helping people understand what is entirely acceptable to outsource (Commodity Content—which we have been outsourcing for centuries with varying degrees of leverage), and what is unacceptable to outsource (Personality Content), not because of some moral conflict, but because Personality Content is an unmade data set.

When people slander the industry of ghostwriting, for example, this is often what they believe is happening: a writer has been hired to “hallucinate” someone else’s Personality Content. As one of the highest-paid ghostwriters in the world, I can tell you the vast majority of the time this is not what’s happening. What’s happening is a smart, accomplished person simply does not have the time, or the skill, to sit down and do “the writing” (the manual labor of organizing thoughts into groupings of words) themselves. It’s too low leverage. So, they hire a ghostwriter (someone like me) to do that work for them. I am not “hallucinating” their Personality Content. I am not making up details about their life that are not real, or choosing Commodity Ideas they have not chosen themselves. And I am certainly not creating truly Original Content on their behalf. I am talking to them (usually on a recorded phone call or Zoom meeting), asking questions, and getting their Personality in their words, spoken aloud. I then take the words they’ve said, cemented into a transcript, and begin whittling it down the same way a sculptor would a block of marble. I remove tangents. I remove unnecessary words. I organize. And I add or subtract any necessary pieces of Commodity Content—which were not the client’s to begin with, and also not “mine.” These are industry-specific words and groupings of words, open-source and owned by no one.

Whether “I” am the one doing this work, or a robot, is somewhat irrelevant. Human beings provide labor leverage, and Large Language Models provide technology leverage. It’s not the form of leverage that matters. It’s the quality of the input. And in order to create a high-quality Digital Brain, it is still the person’s responsibility (the client, in this example) to articulate “how they became themselves,” first. Whether that articulation happens by way of a monologue recorded alone, by way of conversation, through writing yourself, or writing with the help of an editor, doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t matter if it’s a human or a robot who helps you organize the content thereafter. Quite literally the only thing that matters is that YOU provided the input. If you do, you are likely to stand by the quality of the output. (And if you don’t, then don’t be surprised when it doesn’t “sound like you!”)

This is the right way to write with AI. And the beginning of what I believe will be a multi-generational transition in collectively identifying what is worth doing in the first place. AI is not going to steal all the writing jobs (technology leverage). And the ghostwriting industry isn’t going anywhere (labor leverage), because even the most powerful technologies have yet to find a solution to human inaction. Leverage, in and of itself, does not remove the bottleneck of you getting in your own way. You must take the first step, and you must provide the input—and then, and only then, can labor leverage or technology leverage help scale “you.”

The ultimate goal of writing is to say something Original.

If language is an open-source operating system for communication, then most combinations of words and groupings of words are Commodity Content.

If Commodity Content was never yours to begin with, then spending your finite time here on earth manually writing and re-writing the same Commodity Ideas in slightly different variations out of pride for “doing it yourself” is not a symbol of purity, but a Scarlet Letter of stupidity. You are making the conscious choice to write the wrong things.

Personality Content is the unmade data set. It is also one of the only forms of differentiation, association, and “ownership” in the age of infinite text-based Commodity Content. Time spent writing and re-writing Commodity Content, past a baseline level of proficiency, is low leverage and unnecessary. Time spent writing and re-writing Personality Content is higher leverage and additive to the long-term value of your Digital Brain.

But when all conventional wisdom has been said, and “how you became yourself” has been sufficiently articulated in your library of content (your Personal Language Model), what is left? What do you say when there are diminishing returns in repeating yourself, and a machine can repeat the same stories, insights, opinions, and lessons from your Digital Brain, infinitely, without needing your continued involvement?

All that’s left is the creation of Original Content: thinking thoughts that haven’t been thought before, and making connections that haven’t been made before, to say things that haven’t been said before. And I would posit nothing would have a bigger impact on the collective intelligence of our society than having exponentially more people spending exponentially more time “thinking different thoughts,” opposed to endlessly repeating and manually writing the same Commodity Ideas over and over again in the hope of establishing their words as “theirs.”

You do not create something Original simply because your brain thought the thoughts, or your fingers clacked the keys. You also do not create something Original simply because your creation consumed time or effort. Original means additive. It’s new. It’s net-positive. It’s moving the world forward in some big or small way, identifiable to you.

There are only two ways to create something Original.

• Say something different.

• Say the same thing in a meaningfully different way.

An example of the former would be Pythagoras saying, in 500 BC, “The earth is round. Not flat.” These are six Original words. Six words that fundamentally changed the way human beings perceived the world. Before Pythagoras, no one had “thought that thought.” As a result, we now (centuries later) still associate those six words with Pythagoras. This is the epitome of “ownership.”

An example of the latter would be Aristotle, a century and a half later in 350 BC, essentially saying “the same thing” but in a meaningfully different way. He proved Pythagoras’s round-earth theory through empirical and observational evidence—pointing to lunar eclipses, horizon lines, and changing constellations.

This is the art of writing.

It’s not to manually type words. It’s not to repeat Commodity Ideas (“conventional wisdom”) and call it your own. It’s to think deeply about a small number of topics and use writing as a mechanism for understanding. But as you understand each Commodity Idea, you should not remain attached to carrying the burden of repeating those chosen Commodities manually yourself. That’s what the robots are for. And you should feel empowered knowing you are continuing to focus on the next-highest-leverage task at hand: making new connections, forming new hypotheses, and thinking different thoughts, in pursuit of pushing your area of interest further than you found it, creating something Original.

Large Language Models are miraculous machines. But they are not going to replace the need for human beings to “think different thoughts.” And if writing is the most effective mechanism in human history for crystallizing one’s thinking, then AI is not going to replace writing as a skill anytime soon. Besides, in order to use AI, you have to know how to prompt. And in order to prompt, you have to know how to… what? You have to know how to write.

You can’t automate what you can’t articulate.

My hope is these Large Language Models will reduce the amount of time we spend as a society writing and re-writing Commodity Content, and give our Personality Content leverage, so we can spend more time thinking and writing what hasn’t been said yet.

Oh, and just so you know: AI didn’t write this.

I did.

But now that I’ve written it, and crystallized my thinking, and added another 6,500+ words of “approved language” to my Digital Brain, the robots can help me leverage these ideas, infinitely forever.

This is the right way to write with AI.

—Cole

Founder of Different Publishing (you can find my books here!)

Co-Founder of AI Writing Skool

Co-Founder of Ship 30 For 30

Co-Founder of Premium Ghostwriting Academy

Co-Founder of Typeshare

Co-Founder of Ghostbase

Co-Founder of Write With AI