The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI

Jasmine Sun publishes jasmi.news, where she interviews AI researchers, eavesdrops at San Francisco house parties, and reports what she calls “an anthropology of disruption”—on-the-ground dispatches from how frontier technology is changing culture. At Substack’s recent Once and Future Media Forum, Jasmine shared her perspective on the comparative advantages she and other independent writers and creators hold in the age of AI: what skills are gaining value, which are losing it, and where economies of attention are going as a result. She’s the first to acknowledge that writers and creators hold a wide range of views—concerns, optimism, fears, curiosity — about what AI means for their work. But here she makes the case for why writers are better positioned than they might think, and what they can do to exercise that advantage whether they choose to use AI or not. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of her talk.

When economists debate the future of work, they often ask the question: what will humans’ comparative advantage be? I think the key to understanding what the future of work looks like is not, How can humans race against the machine, how can we generate slop faster than the machines can generate slop? but rather, What are the human strengths, and how can we understand what skills are going to go down in value now that AI has made them commoditized, versus what skills are going to go up in value because they are still scarce and because the machines simply aren’t very good at them yet? I’m going to introduce four ideas, or provocations, that have shaped the way that I think about AI and my own media career.

One: The value of summary will go down, and the value of secrets will go up.

Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public. The things that people have not said, things in whisper networks, the tacit knowledge, the open secrets that have never been put in the public domain—the journalist manages to pluck them out and make them public. When you persuade a source to tell you about some corporate malfeasance, or you venture to a remote town that few people have ever written about, or you sneak your way into a tiny underground party and talk about all the people who are there, you are working in a space where there is no training data.

That is what is really valuable. There’s a reason that robotic startups are paying thousands of people to strap little cameras to their heads so that they can fold T-shirts all day and try to take in the world from a human point of view. There’s a reason that data companies like Mercor are paying Redditors $100 an hour to write up their niche hobbies and explain the intricacies of being a knitter, or playing Magic the Gathering. There are all these details and tacit knowledge that you only know by doing, that AI hasn’t had access to yet because it’s just not in the data. AI can summarize, and it can remix information already out there, but it can’t see stuff. It can’t feel stuff. It can’t break news. And the thing that writers can uniquely do is all of that. You can go out into the world, and you can take that knowledge and you can make that public or you can sell it, and that is something that is really valuable.

Two: The value of static content will go down, and the value of live interaction will go up.

I don’t think we’re that far from a world where AI can take in any of our writing styles and replicate it to the point where your median reader will not be able to tell the difference, as long as you feed it the original reporting that you’ve gathered and some notes. And that is a scary thing. The thing is, though, that your audience does want to feel connected to you, and they want to know that a person is real and that you are the same person generating the text. There’s a reason why behind-the-scenes videos go really viral now. It’s because people don’t just want to see the final presentation; they want to see all the proof of work behind it.

For a solo creator, doing live interaction, events, podcast interviews, meetups and hangouts—these things prove that there is a life behind the voice. It allows people to make a connection between a living being and the words on the page and shows that the person’s point of view comes from somewhere. That stuff is going to be scarce, it’s going to be irreplaceable, and I think that most writers should be doing a lot more of it. Every time I do a big written and reported piece, afterward I block out about a month to just go to conferences, go on podcasts, and talk to as many people as possible. Some people don’t like that. They feel like it’s marketing, and it’s not the part that they really enjoy. But I think about it as building that connection and also as getting the ideas out to more people. If I care about the ideas, I want everyone to know about them, no matter the format.

Three: The value of bureaucracies will go down, and the value of founders will go up.

Anyone who works at a tech company will know that AI has blurred the lines between roles. Engineers became designers, and designers became engineers. And companies are also getting much smaller because one person at the very early stages can be their own data scientist, programmer, marketer all at the same time. I think it’s the same for media founders. I think that AI is going to offer a lot of value to people who are jacks-of-all-trades.

I’m a generalist. I think a lot of media founders, a lot of creators, this is your strength too. You don’t need an editor; you’re pretty good at editing your own work. You’re pretty good at picking your own stories. You’re pretty good at being your own marketer. And I think that it’s a real boon. I like that AI helps me with reading a contract before I sign it and telling me what to ask questions about. I like that AI can help me fact-check articles and look up the cites for every sentence, that it can clip videos, that it can negotiate speaking fees.

Before, people would say that if you’re a woman negotiating your speaking fees, you should ask a white man you know with a very large ego. I ask ChatGPT, and it’s incredibly good at this. There’s a lot of stuff that I do not want to do, and I really want AI to do it for me. And so I think this is going to be an amazing age for people who are media founders, who are excited about being sort of the directors and owners of their project and who take advantage of technology to do all the other stuff and focus on their creative vision.

Four: The value of polish is going to go down and the value of personal charisma and style and weirdness is going to go up.

There’s this saying that I was told when I once asked a senior media person whether I should take a staff job at a big publication. It was not The New Yorker, to be clear, but he told me that The New Yorker “makes bad writers good, good writers good, and great writers good.” When I wrote for the New York Times business section, I felt like I was basically outputting code syntax. It felt totally LLM-ful. The reporting was not. Again, I’m very bullish on reporting—but the writing style itself was basically like you could shove that through Claude and be like, “Go figure it out.” And that was a little bit demoralizing, because I like writing and I like style.

The thing that’s really great, though, is that what every Substacker is already really good at is having a very distinct voice that their readers really feel a connection with. I think that your readers probably don’t mind that there are typos. They don’t mind that you get stuff wrong. That is what the AIs cannot do: being able to talk in the first person, being able to be provocative versus hedging every single little thing.

One thing that a lot of my AI and tech friends don’t really understand is that trust is not about information and its quality alone. It’s about the messenger. And so when they talk about having AGIs that do super-persuasion by writing the most persuasive sentence in the world, I think: I don’t think you understand trust, because it’s not about the sentence. It’s about who says it and their track record and what they’ve told me before. And the stronger your individual brand, the trust you build, the voice you have, the track record that is just yours, the better off you’ll be.

I imagine that some people who hear this might disagree with me on a bunch of things about AI progress. That’s okay. But I think that there are a lot of good reasons to be optimistic as a creator right now, as a writer, as an independent writer in particular, somebody who is not part of an institution and really just doing your own thing.

I live in San Francisco, and all the time I talk to my friends who are working at these AI companies, and they’re working 9-9-6 hours. And I’m like, “Why are you doing this?” And for some people it’s a mission. Other people are like, “I’m going to escape the permanent underclass so that in the post-scarcity utopia, I can finally make art and have a coffee shop.” And I’m like, “Dude, you don’t have to wait. You can literally do that right now.”

I really feel that if someone handed me a UBI check and 24 hours in a day, I would be doing exactly what I do right now. I would be talking to people, going out and seeing stuff, writing about it, talking to people about what I write. I really feel that it’s the best time in the world to be an independent writer, and I’m very glad to get to do it with all of you.

Watch Jasmine’s talk from The Once and Future Media Forum here.