Content Creation and Productivity in the Age of AI

 

People keep blaming AI for killing content creativity, but it was already headed toward the food court version of itself long before the robots showed up.

For years, the industry has rewarded speed over thought. More posts. More campaigns. More platforms. Less time to sit with an idea long enough to make it weird or honest or memorable.

Then AI walked into the room like an overqualified intern and said, “You want 400 pieces of acceptable content by This afternoon? No problem.”

The speed and volume were impressive, but the actual content? Technically competent and perfectly acceptable because a lot of modern content already sounded machine-made before machines started making it. AI just perfected the dialect: upbeat, frictionless, emotionally beige. Every sentence polished to the texture of dentist office waiting room furniture.

It’s ubiquitous now: every platform is drowning in words, and somehow almost none of them feel written by anybody.

Because good writing usually comes from tension. Hesitation. Somebody wrestling with a thought long enough to surprise themselves a little. Meaning takes time. Taste takes time. Original thought takes an uncomfortable amount of sitting around staring at nothing, which modern workflows treat like a fire-able offense.

Everything now is optimized to remove the pause. But the pause is usually where the interesting stuff lives. The culture has become deeply impatient with the actual process of creativity: the slow, inefficient part where someone has to think hard enough to say something real.

The Financialization of the Economy

 

I was in line for coffee at Peets. Six bucks for something that used to cost pocket change. 

The guy in front of me was working an investment app like he was playing a slot machine. And, on the surface, it almost seemed normal. Not just the price of the coffee, but the vibe: Everything’s an asset now. Your house, your retirement, your side hustle, your attention span.

Finance stopped being a support system for the economy and quietly became the main character. Instead of helping businesses make things, it increasingly makes money from money. And it’s very good at it.

Corporations used to talk about building products, expanding operations, hiring people. Now they talk about “maximizing shareholder value” like it’s a sacred chant. Which often translates into stock buybacks, cost-cutting, and a kind of corporate calorie restriction: trim the workforce, boost the share price, repeat. It’s like running a restaurant where you slowly replace the food with accounting tricks but still expect five-star reviews.

To be fair, the system rewards this behavior. Executives are paid in stock. Investors want quick returns. Markets react to quarterly earnings like toddlers on sugar. So companies optimize for that. You don’t need a conspiracy when incentives are this loud.

Meanwhile, regular people are pulled into the same orbit. Retirement used to mean pensions. Predictable, boring, almost comforting. Now it’s 401(k)s, index funds, and a vague sense that you should probably know what the S&P 500 did today. We’ve all been conscripted into being part-time financiers, whether we signed up or not. It’s like being told you’re now responsible for flying the plane mid-flight, but don’t worry, there’s a YouTube tutorial.

There’s also this strange side effect where everything starts to look like a trade. Housing isn’t just shelter; it’s an investment vehicle. Education isn’t just learning; it’s ROI. Even companies that clearly make physical things behave like hedge funds with a side gig in manufacturing. The real economy, the one with stuff you can touch, starts to feel like a supporting actor in its own story.

And then there’s inequality, which shows up like an uninvited guest who refuses to leave. When profits flow more toward financial channels than wages, the gains tend to concentrate. If you own assets, great. If you don’t, you’re mostly watching the scoreboard from the sidelines. It’s not exactly subtle.

It isn’t just the imbalance, it’s the way it reshapes how we think. There’s a quiet cultural shift where everything becomes a calculation. Is this worth my time? My energy? My “personal brand”? We start to sound like spreadsheets with opinions. Even creativity gets nudged into metrics -- views, clicks, monetization -- as if its main job is to justify its own existence in dollars.

I get the appeal. Finance is efficient. It’s scalable. It promises control in a world that feels increasingly chaotic. But it’s also a bit like using a chainsaw to butter toast. Impressive, sure, but maybe not the right tool for everything.

I don’t think the answer is to romanticize some pre-finance golden age, that ship sailed a while ago (probably leveraged and sold in tranches). But it does seem worth asking whether we’ve let the logic of finance seep too far into places it doesn’t belong. Not everything needs to be optimized, traded, or turned into a yield.

Sometimes a house should just be a house. A job should just be a job. And coffee, expensive or not, shouldn’t feel like a symptom of a system that’s constantly trying to turn your morning into a market opportunity.

Or maybe that’s just me, standing in line, watching someone refresh a stock app while the barista mispronounces my name.

Mocking Bird

 

Imposter Syndrome

Whispers of doubt, like a chilling breeze,

Creep into my mind with unsettling ease.

The mockingbird perches, its song a jeer,

Mocking my efforts, igniting fear.

"Who are you to wield the writer's quill?

Your words mere echoes, lacking skill."

Ignoring the taunts of that mocking bird,

I defy my doubts with every word.

Style Meets the Algorithm

I’ve got a habit. 

Not a dangerous one (no one’s staging interventions), but a stylistic tic … a little rhetorical pivot that walks in one direction, stops, and then sharply turns on its heel. You know, the tried and true: "Not this. That." Such as "That’s not about success. That’s about keeping up appearances."

I call it “the correction.” Professors call it “contrast negation.” Whatever it's proper name is, I’ve always liked how it landed. It’s clean. It snaps. It gives a piece a kind of rhythm and makes a point without having to raise its voice. For years, I've used it the way I use garlic: generously, and probably more often than necessary.

Lately, though, I’ve been told this little move of mine is ]]dramatic pause[[ suspicious.

Apparently, if you see a line like “That’s not about winning. That’s about not losing,” you’re supposed to squint at it like a detective in a low-budget crime show and mutter, “AI wrote this.”

Which is funny, because I can dig up blog posts I wrote five or six years ago (back when AI was still mostly a sci-fi punchline) and there it is: “That’s not about confidence. That’s about fear wearing better clothes.” Right there in black and white, no algorithm in sight.

So I guess I have two explanations to chose from: Either I was secretly channeling the future like some kind of accidental oracle, or (and this feels slightly more plausible) AI learned that move from writers like me who were already using it.

But we’ve decided, collectively, that the fingerprint belongs to the machine, not the human who taught it how to hold the pen. So, we’re starting to treat patterns like they’re crimes. As if any repeatable rhythm in language must have been mass-produced in a server farm somewhere. It’s like accusing a pianist of cheating because they used the same chord progression twice. No, that’s not automation. That’s style. (Oooops! There I go again.)

Or maybe it’s just habit. Writers, like everyone else, fall into grooves. We find shapes that work and we reuse them. Not because we’re lazy, but because language is a tool and when you find a grip that fits your hand, you don’t immediately throw it away just to prove you’re original.

What’s strange is how quickly we’ve flipped the script. The things that used to signal craft — clarity, rhythm, structure — things you’ve been doing for years get rebranded as artificial. (Damn, now I've used an em-dash, another AI "tell")

There’s something mildly absurd about being told your natural writing voice now sounds like a bot, as if you’ve been unknowingly cosplaying as software this whole time. But it also nudges at a bigger question: if a machine can replicate the patterns we rely on, were those patterns ever as uniquely ours as we thought? Or were they just well-worn paths we all happened to walk?

I don’t have a neat answer. I’m still going to use “the correction” when it earns its keep. It still works. It still lands. I’m just a little more aware now that what once felt like a signature move might actually be a shared accent … and one that’s been picked up, polished, and redistributed at such a scale that it's now it's an AI tell.

Which, depending on your mood, is either fascinating or irritating.

Not a crisis. Just a shift. (See? Just can’t help myself.)

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Follow Up 

Barron's has just published a piece on AlphaSense's library of corporate documents, earnings call transcripts, SEC filings, and press releases. It indicates  that a single-sentence construction has exploded across corporate America since 2024. The pattern is "It's not just X, it's Y."

Hmmmmm … now I have to consider leaving this tool out of my “go tos” ‘cause AI has made it so ubiquitous that it’s making my writing sound like everybody else’s.

Oh, well.

A meaningless number ... but I like it.

 

Last week, 3 of my LinkedIn posts got a combined 357,983 impressions.

Vanity metrics. Everybody pretends to despise them while secretly refreshing dashboards like gamblers rubbing lottery tickets under a gas station light. Followers. Likes. Views. Open rates. Reach. A whole spreadsheet ecosystem built to quantify human attention, which is already one of the flakiest substances on earth.

I know most of those “impressions” meant nothing. A half-second glance. A distracted scroll. Somebody opening LinkedIn by accident while trying to check the weather. The internet counts all of it like an overenthusiastic carnival worker.

And even though I know this, I’m not above it. 

Not even close.

A big number activates my ancient monkey brain. I saw big numbers on 3 posts, added them up to 357,983 and briefly felt like a medieval peasant who’d been invited to sit near the king.

Meaningless? Absolutely.

Distracting? Unfortunately, yes.

Fun? Can't pretend it wasn't.

Reality Check

 

REALITY CHECK: People don’t have enough time

 

• The average professional receives 120 new emails each day. 
  
  
• Text messaging users send or receive an average of 41.5 messages per day.
  
  

I could go on, citing exposure to “traditional” advertising and other messaging … but the point is clear:

People receive too many communications.

 

➤Which leads to the reality:

Every message received demands attention and time from

people who are already too busy.

 

➤Which reminds marketing writers/creators:

Ya gotta improve your game daily,

both at getting and holding your best prospect’s attention.

The Ads Your Customers Swear They Never Saw

 

There’s a special moment in every marketer’s life when the data taps you on the shoulder, clears its throat, and says, “Hey, you might want to sit down for this.”

Valspar just had one of those moments.

Neuromarketing researcher Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy discovered that 95% of shoppers exposed to Valspar ads bought the brand. Only 70% of the “unexposed” did. 

Great news, right? Champagne? High-fives? Cue the case-study video?

Hold the confetti cannon.

Because when those same shoppers were asked at checkout if they remembered seeing any Valspar advertising, most of them said, with full confidence, “Nope. Never seen it.”

So there it is: the creative work doing the heavy lifting is the very work people swear they’ve never laid eyes on.

Which, honestly, feels about right.

Your brain is a stingy little machine, burning 20% of your calories while making up 2% of your body. It refuses to let your conscious mind handle anything it can safely automate. Walking, tying shoes, choosing paint brands … all shoved into the dusty back room marked AUTOPILOT: NO LOITERING.

And advertising? It sneaks in through that door.

Ramsøy found that people spot an ad in roughly 2–3 seconds. Two. Maybe three. That’s your window. That tiny sliver where attention flares just long enough to stamp an emotional watermark on the subconscious before the brain yanks the power cable from the memory department.

And that watermark? That’s what guides the hand reaching for paint cans later, while the shopper’s mouth says, “I just like this brand better.”

So here’s the uncomfortable truth: If you’re measuring success by whether people remember your ads, you’re basically asking your guests to review the meal based on a dream they half-had during dessert.

Stop chasing recall. Chase resonance. Chase the spark in those first 300 milliseconds when decision-making actually happens.

Your best campaigns might be the ones nobody remembers … except their brains already bought the product.

The Annoying New Rhythm of TV

 

I realized something had shifted the night a car chase got interrupted by a toothpaste commercial.

Not at the end of a scene. Not after a dramatic pause. Right in the middle of screeching tires and someone dangling off a bridge *bam* “micro-foam technology.”

Ads don’t bother me in principle. I understand the deal. We pay less, they sell stuff. Fine. But TV used to have rhythm. Scenes had buttons. Jokes landed. Tension peaked. Then the ad break arrived like a predictable thunderclap. You could feel the structure underneath it.

Now, when streaming movies on services like YouTube, the interruptions feel like a cat sprinting across your keyboard. No warning. No rhythm. No sense of story. 

Maybe we’ve just gotten used to being interrupted. Our attention spans are basically public sidewalks now … any brand can set up a folding table in the middle of them. We’ll step around it and keep going.

Still, I miss when timing mattered. When pauses meant something. When a scene could actually finish before an emu tried to sell me insurance.

Yes, I’ll keep watching. I’ll keep rolling my eyes when the climactic duel is interrupted by a cheerful voice promising two-day shipping. I’ll mute it. I’ll sigh. I’ll wait. But every time an ad crashes into a moment that was about to mean something, I feel like I’m watching creativity get nudged aside by a spreadsheet.

Am I the only one muttering at the screen or does everybody use the break to scroll on their phones?

We Need Education Reform

My youngest is graduating from university this month and the world has radically changed since her freshman year. And it is becoming increasingly clear that it's time to radically reform our education system..

We built an education system for factories.

For bells that told us when to move.

For clocks that told us when to stop.

For bosses who told us what to do.

We taught kids how to show up on time.

How to sit still.

How to follow the plan.

How to pass the test.

And for a while, it worked. Factories needed rhythm. Offices needed order. Society ran smoother when everyone knew their line and stayed inside it.

But now? We’ve built machines that do all that better than we ever could.

AI doesn’t get tired.

It doesn’t forget.

It follows instructions perfectly.

It memorizes flawlessly.

It regurgitates infinitely.

It never shows up late, never needs a coffee, never blanks out on test day.

It does exactly what we were trained to do … what we're training our kids to do ... only faster, cheaper, cleaner.

The world has changed: Information isn’t the prize anymore … knowledge is cheap and easily accessible. Now, the very skills we spent decades drilling into kids are the ones least worth having.

So what now?

We’ve gotta refocus the educational system on teaching kids how to think, not just what to think.

How to question the premise.

How to build something that doesn’t exist yet.

How to use those infinite facts not as answers, but as ingredients.

The future won’t belong to the ones who know the most, it’ll belong to the ones who can connect the dots the machine can’t see.

The machines can follow the instructions. We need humans who can write them.

The Sea Is the Sea

When critics went hunting for symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway famously pushed back:

“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. 
The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.
The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse.
All the symbolism that people say is shit.”

Of course, the story resonates beyond its literal parts. Of course, readers will see struggle, dignity, mortality, grace. Hemingway wasn’t naïve about that.

But he was serious about something deeper that can be important to writers: the work begins with the concrete. Not theme. Not metaphor. Not what the thing stands for. The thing itself. The sea. The fish. The boy. The sharks.

Hemingway’s rebuke of critics is a reminder to writers that meaning collapses when it’s declared too early. If you write toward symbolism, you end up with cardboard symbols instead of living objects. But if you commit to the truth of the words themselves -- the texture of the rope, the weight of the line, the ache in the old man’s hands -- meaning happens anyway. And it feels earned, not imposed.

For writers, that’s the lesson. Don’t chase allegory. Don’t decorate your work with “important ideas.” Put your faith in the tangible. Tell the truth about what's there. Let readers discover what it means.

________________________

Here are some other posts that touch on Hemingway and his work:

The Iceberg Theory of Writing

The Original Hemingway on Punctuation

Write Drunk Edit Sober

Writers Read

The Sun Also Rises

Copywriting is Dead

 

Every few weeks, someone announces that copywriting is dead.

Not evolving. Not shifting. Dead.

Usually this declaration comes from someone who discovered AI last month and now talks like they’ve been personally briefed by the future.

I get it. If your mental model of a copywriter is “person who turns ideas into words,” then yeah, that job looks pretty replaceable. Machines are very good at rearranging words into other words. They don’t need sleep, they don’t send invoices, and they never ask inconvenient questions like “what are we actually trying to say here?”

Clients notice that. They know they can open a tool, type a sentence, and out will come something that feels close enough. It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It’s … fine.

And for a lot of businesses, “fine” works.

That’s the part people don’t like to admit.

Because it means the threat isn’t that AI is better than you. It’s that it’s good enough for people who don’t know the difference.

What’s changed is patience. Clients don’t want delays, debates, or someone poking holes in their ideas. They want momentum. AI gives them that: no pushback, no hesitation, just output.

Meanwhile, good writing tends to do the opposite. It questions things. Slows things down. Refuses to polish a bad idea into a shiny bad idea. From the outside, that just looks like being difficult.

So now when you say “I’m a copywriter,” what some clients hear is: slower, pricier, and likely to push back.

Nobody wants to wait. Nobody wants to pay for uncertainty. And nobody wants to feel like they’re being slowed down by a human when a machine can spit something out in five seconds and say “good luck.”

So let the rebranding begin.  “Strategist.” “Creative partner.” “Growth something.” Same work, fancier label. Like labeling the product “premium” with out changing it, this doesn’t really fix the problem. Because the real shift isn’t what you call yourself, it’s what you own.

If you’re just delivering words, you’re competing with a machine that delivers words instantly. That’s a losing game.

If you’re deciding what should be said, why it matters, and how it ties to actual results, you’re not the typist anymore, you’re the one steering.

And steering is harder to automate. Mostly because it requires judgment. And a willingness to say, “this idea isn’t very good,” which machines politely avoid.

So no, copywriting isn’t dead.

But the version of it that was basically “expensive typing” is having a rough time.

Fair enough. It probably should.

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The next step? Take a look at Why Every Copywriter & Content Writer Needs an AI Usage Policy