Resources → The Newsletter • 4 min read

🔮 Why there's nothing artificial about AI's future

Change is only scary if you're unwilling to change with it.

With this in mind, let's dive into one of the fastest-growing segments of the internet economy, try to understand how it works, and peel back why this might be exactly what our creator careers need.

💬 In this week's AI-themed issue:

Toolbox. See which AI tools might be worth adding to your stack.
Input. Uncover how to automate your creative inspiration.
Limits. What can humans uniquely do that AI cannot?

🛠️ The AI tool landscape

Near the close of 2022 we saw the popularity of AI tools skyrocket. It felt like at every turn, there was a new use case for AI — from social media avatars to full-blown article-writing robots.

But what does this all mean for creators?

More than ever before, these tools will empower solo creators to function as entire teams. Enabling gifted artists, writers, and storytellers to raise the level of quality and output to incredible new heights.

The above chart offers a bit of organization to the rapidly changing AI landscape. The areas you will likely want to pay the most attention to are Text, Image, Video, and Speech tools.

Here are a few ways these tools can be used to expand your output and increase your quality:

You can use tools like DreamStudio or Midjourney to create new featured images for your posts and to illustrate important points.
Resemble or Descript can take your written content and turn it into audio files — enabling you to start podcasting without any added labor.
Runway and Synthesia can transform written or audio content into video, and will even generate avatars to appear in your videos as well.
Jasper, Copy AI, and many more can help you generate ideas, outlines, and entire paragraphs in seconds. They can also optimize your writing according to a range of SEO guidelines, reading levels, and communication tones.

So, where should you start with all this?

Pick one tool and incorporate it into your process for 30 days. Whether that means launching a podcast or YouTube channel with AI content, doubling your output, or adding one AI image to every post — just try a few experiments and see what happens.

The AI revolution has only just begun, and the better you know how these tools work, the more likely you'll come out on top.

🗞 Latest tips & stories

How big tech is thinking about AI's future
7 ways ChatGPT can power your marketing
Will AI disrupt the creator economy's momentum?
How to schedule your creativity for optimal output
The 5 best books on AI

🎨 How AI helps creativity

Guillermo del Toro is a fascinating director to follow. Over the years, they've been able to spin up some of the most imaginative characters and worlds into blockbuster productions.

Writer Cal Newport wanted to know how they did this. How could one person manage such a steady stream of creative inspiration? The answer: lots and lots of stuff.

For decades, del Toro has built a collection of oddities - from monstrous figurines to weird furniture pieces and everything in between. This assortment grew so much that del Toro had to buy a second house down the street from their home to accommodate it all.

For creators, AI represents a similar benefit.

At its core, creativity is about making new connections. Taking two things that have no relationship and putting them together, like a peanut butter sandwich and a Rubix cube 👇.

AI will enable us to make connections in a way and at speeds that were previously thought to be impossible.

How?

Through play. The breakthrough creators of the next era will be those who build space in their schedules for experimentation, wandering, and curiosity. Just like del Toro does with his collections.

Whether it's having a random conversation with ChatGPT, or trying to generate the strangest output from DALL-E 2 — the better you get at following your own interests with AI, the more interesting, creative, and profitable your work will be.

🤖 Where AI will take the creator economy

The above resources focused on the possibilities and positives of this new technology. But as with anything new, there are valid concerns still to be worked out.

In a conversation on the Contrarian Marketing podcast, the hosts laid out a few of these in detail:

AI will certainly disrupt some creative professions. Primarily those that completely ignore the changing landscape.
AI's ability to fact-check is limited, which could lead to trouble for undiscerning readers.
For now, AI is purely generative, which means it relies on what already exists and cannot produce anything original.

Even with just a cursory glance, you can already see where human content will shine.

Human creators who stay informed about this new technology, work to display their accuracy and expertise, and labor to have original opinions will rise above the noise.

AI may be the very thing we need to reach the next stage of the creator phenomenon.