One of the most common questions I get asked these days is:
“Cole, how is AI going to change things for writers?”
And the answer for each Writer Career Path is somewhere between “marginally” and “exponentially.”
Will AI render the craft of writing obsolete over the next decade? Of course not. In fact, the counterargument I often present pessimists is, “What skill do you need to have in order to use any of these consumer AI models and platforms? In order to prompt you have to… that’s right… you have to know how to write.”
Writing just might be (if it’s not already) the single most valuable skill of the next few decades.
The Industrial Revolution and the invention of the tractor didn’t destroy farming. It scaled farmers exponentially, and led to the globalization of trade.
Photoshop didn’t destroy the animation, sketching, drawing, or design trade. It lowered the barrier to entry and allowed exponentially more people to become professional designers. (And then Canva did the same thing, lowering the barrier to entry further, allowing non-designers to become reasonably proficient.)
Instagram didn’t destroy the photography business. It lowered the barrier to entry and allowed exponentially more people to become photographers.
The list goes on.
All throughout history, new technologies have had net-positive effects on society. These technologies reduce costs, democratize access, increase competition, and accelerate innovation. Now, have some industries declined, or been rendered irrelevant in the process? Of course. But these losses sit in a broader context of an abundance of opportunity.
And if you don’t believe or agree with me, let’s just invert the question:
Would you trade access to the Internet (digital paper) to keep the once-booming physical paper industry? Of course not.
Would you trade modern pharmaceuticals to maintain the sales of outdated, now-terrifying medical devices from the 1900s? Of course not.
Would you trade your iPhone for a rotary phone because you don’t want the rotary phone companies to go out of business? Of course not.
Over and over again, innovation doesn’t destroy industries. It changes them, augments them, and provides opportunity for people to develop new skills. And more times than not, these new skills lead to increased productivity, less work (or less “taxing” work, as seen with the decrease of blue collar jobs and the increase of white collar jobs), and more income—for both these new businesses, as well as their employees and shareholders.
And I agree, yes, it will.
But I also disagree, and no, it won’t.
I can’t speak for all industries. However, I’ve been writing on the Internet for over 15 years now. And, without patting myself on the back too hard, I have been right about every major writing trend of the past two decades.
I started writing online in 2007, back when the masses called “blogging a fad.”
I started self-publishing on Amazon in 2013, back when the masses called “self-publishing a scam.”
I started a ghostwriting business in 2016, back when the masses called ghostwriting “unethical.”
I started a paid newsletter business in 2017, back before Substack raised hundreds of millions of dollars, pioneered the category, and started educating journalists on how much more money they could earn starting their own 1-person publication (aka: a paid newsletter with subscription revenue).
I started a cohort-based writing program in the pandemic, when the masses thought the sky was caving in, opportunities didn’t exist anymore, and society was going to collapse.
Etc.
Now, admittedly, AI is a completely new and different technology than we’ve ever known. So despite having been “right” many times in the past, I have no idea what’s going to happen in the future—especially the further out we project.
My goal here is simply to give you my best guess on how I see AI augmenting each of the major Writer Career Paths for the next decade:
Writer Career Path #1: Literary Writer
Writer Career Path #2: Genre Fiction Writer
Writer Career Path #3: Non-Fiction Writer
Writer Career Path #4: Newsletter Writer
Writer Career Path #5: Content Writer
Writer Career Path #6: Ghostwriter
Writer Career Path #7: Copywriter
Writer Career Path #8: Writerpreneur
Writer Career Path #9: Category Copywriter
Let’s dive in.
Of all the Writer Career Paths, literary writing is likely to be the least affected by AI.
In fact, I can imagine a world where the entire purpose of the literature genre is to produce work that is AI-Free. Book awards will require author confirmation they did not use AI in the writing process. Curated best-selling lists (like the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal) for literary novels will require the same. And much of the status associated with being a Literary Writer won’t just be the quality of your work, but the fact you didn’t use AI to produce it.
Authors adding badges or watermarks to their novel covers proclaiming their work is AI-Free (marketing to a specific type of reader).
AI-Free writing & publishing conferences.
An increase in demand for analog, legacy writer experiences: writing retreats, book clubs, in-person workshops, etc.
A fascinating (and favorite) example of this is George Saunders’ paid newsletter on Substack, Story Club. This newsletter is the complete opposite of the AI-everything narrative that seems to be devouring everyone’s social algorithms. And yet, it’s the most popular Literature paid newsletter on the platform with thousands of paying subscribers and one of the most engaged comments sections I’ve ever seen.
Clearly, despite all the innovation forward since the days of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Nabokov, there is still significant demand for “the good old days” of literary writing. And I believe, as AI accelerates other Writer Career Paths, it will actually have an inverse effect on literature. AI will make literary readers even more committed to the genre. And AI will challenge literary writers to test their skills against these new technologies—the same way Grandmaster chess players do, despite supercomputers having the capacity to perform the same skills, better and faster.
Another good analogy here would be classical music. New innovations like modern recording equipment, Auto-tune, and now AI, have certainly augmented the music industry—and shifted customer demand to newer, faster-growing categories (punk rock, trap, EDM, etc.). But these innovations have not “killed” orchestras or most parents’ desire for their child to play a musical instrument.
Literature will follow a similar trajectory.
AI and its impact on genre fiction is most likely going to exist on a very wide spectrum.
On one end, you will have something similar to the AI-Free movement we will see in literature.
In the lower-middle, you will have fiction writers who use AI for brainstorming, worldbuilding, feedback on their writing, editing, etc., but who still prefer to do most of the “creative work” and writing themselves.
In the upper-middle, you will have fiction writers who use AI not just for these same tasks, but to also build systems for themselves—acting as a 1-person publishing company orchestrating an army of agents. And in the process, many of these fiction writers will inevitably lean on AI to take on more and more of the writing itself.
And on the other side of the spectrum, you will have savvy digital marketers disguised as fiction writers using AI to spam-create as many stories as they can, in specific genres, to dominate search algorithms and brute-force victory through volume.
So, what is AI’s impact going to be on the world of genre fiction—and the career path of becoming a successful Genre Fiction Writer?
Well, it depends on what kind of writer you want to be, what outcome you’re trying to optimize for (is it money? is it creative freedom? is it leverage?) and how you want to play the game—because there will be multiple “right answers.”
In addition, I believe AI-forward Genre Fiction Writers will likely be the first ones to build the bridge between genre fiction and the inevitable rise of a new AI-powered Hollywood.
Film studios have already started pivoting away from taking risks on brand new screenplays from unknown writers, and started prioritizing buying up best-selling novels from writers with existing audiences and then adapting these stories for film and television. And it’s reasonable to assume this trend will continue, faster and at a fraction of the cost, with AI video-generation platforms. Major film studios already act as venture capital firms—each film, a “startup.” So once the majors—Universal Pictures, Paramount, Warner Bros., Disney, Sony, Amazon, etc.—harness AI video platforms that can create entire shows and films in 1/100th the time for 1/100th their typical investment, the entire game will be to buy up as much IP as possible. Each major film studio will have their own AI video model (or they will all license the most powerful one). Each will spend billions and billions of dollars buying up as many “proven” novels and short stories as possible. And they will feed those novels into their AI video models to produce 100x more movies and TV shows for consumers to choose from.
This mega-trend is something I think about a lot—and makes me very excited for Genre Fiction Writers.
There will be a ton of money chasing proven, high-performing fiction stories.
Non-fiction writing is likely to be one of the Writer Career Paths most impacted by AI.
Because the truth is, in the context of writing non-fiction business, finance, or life advice books, the vast majority of “authors” care very little about the craft of writing. These are founders, CEOs, speakers, influencers, celebrities… people who want to be seen as an “industry authority” more than they want to be seen as a writer. And so, for them, writing a book is more of a means to an end than it is a career path or calling. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
That said, yes, there is a small percentage of Non-Fiction Writers who don’t fit this bill. I’m guessing writers like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ray Dalio, Elizabeth Gilbert, Margaret Atwood, etc., couldn’t care less whether their next book leads to an increase in speaking gigs or lead flow for their business. These writers enjoy the craft of writing, see it as a vehicle for crystallizing their own thinking, and derive significant joy (or status—nothing wrong with that either) from sharing their clarified insights and stories with the world. For them, the journey is the destination.
Will AI render these types of committed writers irrelevant? Of course not.
In fact, I would argue it will have the opposite effect.
Since publishing a non-fiction book is the new “business card,” AI is going to lead to a dramatic increase in the number of business owners, startup founders, executives, motivational speakers, etc., who publish books. And these books will be filled with commoditized insights. They won’t say anything new. They’ll simply repeat conventional wisdom, sandwiched between stories personal to the author—which, ironically, will accelerate the deterioration of publishing non-fiction books as an effective “positioning strategy.”
But… as AI increases the supply of business owners, influencers, and celebrities who “write books,” the inverse effect will be an increase in demand for non-commoditized insights. From innovative, credible thinkers, non-fiction book buyers will care less about “how much” AI was used in the creation of the book and more about how different, unique, and valuable the insights are inside.
On one end, you will have the literary equivalent: creative non-fiction writers and memoirists who essentially write “true novels.” These writers lean heavily, almost entirely on personal stories—maybe the hardest and least likely thing for AI to “automate,” unless given training data on everything you’ve experienced in your life to-date.
One notch up, you will have Nobel prize-winning academics who, at most, use AI to assist with deep research. But these writers will still spend a considerable amount of time manually reading, interviewing, experimenting, synthesizing their hypotheses and takeaways, and then crystallizing their insights in prose form.
Next, you will have Hybrid Non-Fiction Writers: part writer, part marketer and AI maestro. I can imagine writers like Ryan Holiday falling into this category—people who are care deeply about the craft of non-fiction writing, but who are also business savvy and eager to leverage these new technologies to produce more high-quality work, faster.
Next, you will have the vast majority of business owners, founders, executives, investors, influencers, and celebrities. These people just want a book with their name on it—and oftentimes hire ghostwriters (or soon to be AI Ghostwriters) to help them achieve that goal as quickly as possible. There is nothing wrong with wanting to “publish a book” as a marketing and positioning strategy. It’s just worth acknowledging that as AI makes this easier, at lower and lower costs, this “marketing trick” will experience diminishing returns.
And lastly, you will have AI-spammers: savvy digital marketers who use these new technologies and tools to discover pockets of demand on Amazon for hyper-specific keywords, and then use AI to pump out self-published books to capture that demand at lightning speed. This is already Amazon’s biggest problem, and as AI models improve, and as more AI-powered publishing tools get created, this problem will only increase at an exponential rate.
If you think about it, what is a “book?”
A book is just a long-form training prompt for human beings. It’s a bunch of clarified insights stuck inside one person’s brain, put down on paper (translation: given leverage), with the hope of those insights landing in lots of other people’s brains—and successfully changing those people’s behavior.
A finance expert writes a book about finance to help other people solve financial problems in their life, business, etc.
A nutritionist writes a book about nutrition to help other people solve health problems in their life.
A therapist writes a book about marriage counseling to help other people solve problems in their own marriages.
Etc.
Now, there is a subset of non-fiction that is “entertainment.” This could be memoirists like David Sedaris who write essays and short stories based on real-life events and experiences. But this could also be academics, columnists, or just everyday “thinkers” who write books about true topics—history, economics, life advice, etc.—that are interesting, maybe even entertaining, but do not change your behavior as a reader. Authors like Malcolm Gladwell come to mind here. When you read a Malcolm Gladwell book, you learn a bunch of dinner-party facts that are both interesting and, at times, entertaining. But at the end of the book, you aren’t really supposed to “do” anything with that information.
The vast majority of non-fiction books are, fundamentally, intended to change reader behavior. They teach you “how” to do something—or “why” something is the way that it is (with the hopes of your newfound perspective, in some way, changing the way you live your life). And so, pure entertainment aside, that means most non-fiction books are really just long-form prompts for human behavior.
So, if your goal is to help people with your writing—to give leverage to your unique insights, “scale” your learnings into the brains of lots and lots of other people, and successfully change their behavior—then it’s worth considering a book might no longer be the most effective vehicle to accomplish your goal.
Because here’s what happens:
You write a non-fiction book, sharing your insights.
Some people read it (not “all people,” just some).
Only a percentage of those people end up reading the entire book.
And only a percentage of that percentage actually implement the things they learn from your book.
You write a long-form mega-prompt (which is really no different than writing “a book”—because a book is just a mega-prompt for humans).
You wrap that mega-prompt inside a digital education product (an online course, for example) or a SaaS wrapper (a consumer-friendly digital platform or tool).
Now, instead of “reading” your book and manually putting your insights into practice, customers can “use” your prompt and automatically implement your insights into whatever action you are helping them take, or task you are helping them “do.”
And because your insights have successfully automated an “action,” or increased the reliability of an action being executed successfully, you end up helping a greater percentage of people successfully change their behavior—and unlock the outcomes of these new behaviors.
But it doesn’t stop there.
With all that in mind, consider how this new way of seeing non-fiction knowledge also changes the business model of monetizing “How To” information.
Selling books is a challenging business model. “Books” as a category are stuck in the $10-$50 per copy range (depending on format: eBook, paperback, hardcover, exclusive leather-bound, etc.), with a pretty rock-hard ceiling at $100 per copy—and that’s for a super-ding-dong “Collector’s Edition.” On top of that, books are stand-alone products. You buy one, and then you’re done. And only a small subset of customers become repeat buyers, usually buying additional copies as gifts.
Books have very little pricing power
And books have no recurring revenue
Which is why the vast majority of non-fiction authors (even the most successful ones, like James Clear, Jen Sincero, Ryan Holiday, etc.) monetize in lots of other ways besides just the sale of their books. They sell courses and workbooks and journals and merchandise; they get paid to speak at events; they hold workshops; they get hired as consultants; and so on.
All AI is going to do is add more (and more lucrative) monetization options.
Take the same information, turn it into a mega-prompt bundled inside an online course, and sell it for $350?
Or take the same information, wrap it in SaaS, and charge $20 per month to use it?
Or take the same information, break it apart into smaller chunks, and drip it out each week as a paid newsletter for $20 per month or $200 per year?
Or take the same information and sell it as a B2B consulting roadmap for $20,000?
Or take the same information and turn it into a PDF of differentiated IP and training data for a specialized AI model, and sell that PDF of differentiated insights to a huge company for $200,000?
The point is, AI is going to unlock so many more, and more lucrative, revenue streams for “differentiated thinkers” to monetize their insights.
And as these “thinkers” start to wake up to the-value-of-their-value, it’s not unreasonable to consider that in the age of AI, commodity non-fiction books are going to increase exponentially (easy to write, cheap to produce), whereas non-commodity, highly differentiated non-fiction thinkers will choose not to write books at all.
Newsletter Writers will likely follow a similar trajectory as Non-Fiction Writers.
AI is going to make it easier and cheaper for everyday people to:
Launch (free and paid) newsletters
Write content
And “scale” that content with more content (newsletters being chopped into Tweets and LinkedIn posts and even AI-generated Instagram Reels and TikTok videos).
Now, I actually don’t think this is a bad thing—or even all that different from the way the world is right now. In every industry, on every platform, “content” is already incredibly saturated. And yet, new and interesting creators emerge every single day. People brand new to long-established platforms create new accounts and end up building meaningful audiences. And for years, the masses have been saying “email is dead”—yet, every year, more people launch newsletters, and more people make money from email.
So all AI is going to do is take these existing, escalating trends, and make them move faster.
First, AI is going to add leverage. This is true for every Writer Career Path, but I’ll stick with Newsletter Writers for now. There are a lot of manual tasks involved in publishing a weekly (or whatever cadence) newsletter. And we aren’t far from AI agents being capable of doing 80% of those tasks: uploading drafts to your preferred email platform; evaluating weekly data; feeding that data back into a spreadsheet; analyzing that data and coming to iterative conclusions; etc. As a result, there will be newsletter writers capable of producing millions, maybe even tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars in subscription revenue, with zero employees and almost no costs—because they will have significantly more leverage.
Second, AI is going to give rise to a tidal wave of niche-specific newsletters. It will become very easy to spin up a weekly newsletter in any niche that exists and have AI “run” it autonomously. Obviously, at this point, your “goal” as a writer is no longer to do the writing, but to use writing as a means to achieve some end. As a result, we’ll start to see more savvy newsletter writers act as 1-person publishing houses—orchestrating an army of AI agents to operate hundreds, maybe even thousands of ultra-niche newsletters (the same way savvy digital marketers do with ultra-niche self-published books on Amazon).
Third, AI may lead to a new sub-category of paid newsletters (or new sub-category of all “content”), which is Personalized Newsletters. In a not-so-distant future, I can imagine AI unlocking the ability for every single person on your email list to receive a “different” version of that week’s newsletter—depending on their preferences, background, and beliefs. A simple example would be AI knowing if the subscriber is female, and to change the examples in that week’s newsletter to be female-oriented—whereas if the subscriber is male, to change the examples to be more male-oriented. Or, more specifically, AI might know one female subscriber is a Democrat whereas another female subscriber is a Republican, and to tailor the examples, stories, or perspectives in that newsletter accordingly. Obviously, there are some terrifying implications of this sort of echo-chamber technology, but it’s “possible” and likely not far away.
And fourth, since paid newsletters are significantly more profitable and scalable than writing non-fiction books, more non-fiction writers are going to pursue this business model instead. Again, a high-quality non-fiction book usually takes 1-3 years to write. Then, when it’s done, the most you can sell it for is maybe $30. On top of that, customers give you money once, and that’s it—very few repeat purchases, and no recurring revenue. But if you were to take all the same content, the exact same words, but call it a “paid newsletter” and drip chapters (or pieces of chapters) out weekly, suddenly you can charge $20+ per month (or $200+ per year), generate subscription revenue (making your business more predictable and defensible), and “get paid up-front” to write the book you were already going to write. And so we will see more of these writers choose to start paid newsletters instead of writing books—and then use AI to scale their 1-person publishing businesses.
This is another career path that is going to be heavily impacted by AI.
Remember, most companies and business owners use the term “content writing” as an umbrella term that encompasses all writing. But that’s not true. Sales copywriting—assets that sell and persuade customers—is not “content writing.” And ghostwriting—thought leadership content co-created with founders, executives, investors, etc.—is also not “content writing.”
Generally speaking, “content writing” means creating educational, somewhat commoditized content on behalf of a company.
This could be:
SEO blog posts
Website content
Technical walkthroughs and FAQs
Company announcements and press releases
Etc.
And the truth is, all of these content types will be the first to get eaten by AI. They are the easiest to write, easiest to automate, and easiest to “scale” with agents.
And this same trend is going to be true for lots of other jobs in lots of other industries as well: Independent Contributors becoming AI Managers.
The future of Content Writing is not going to be you, sitting by yourself with a cup of coffee, getting paid to manually write thoughtful SEO blog posts about life insurance, drop-shipping, or liposuction.
Instead, the Content Writing career path is going to become a fiercely competitive game of leverage. Companies will want to know how much “content” you can produce as an individual using AI—and will make decisions on who to hire, employ, and keep on staff based on volume more than quality (since, using AI, quality will become generally commoditized).
The 10x Content Writer: Someone who doesn’t just use AI to produce ten times more volume than all the other content writers, but also develops their own unique prompts (aka: intellectual property) to produce differentiated and valuable content for a specific industry or type of company. These 10x Content Writers will earn a massive premium on their skills. Everyone else will struggle to find jobs and be stuck in a race to the bottom on Upwork and Fiverr.
The AI Agent Orchestrator: The other type of Content Writer will ascend out of being a high-leverage Individual Contributor and into an AI Manager responsible for overseeing agents. Instead of doing the writing, or even using AI to do the writing, they will simply build and oversee the systems that use AI to do the writing.
All that said, it’s important to remember that Content Writing as an industry isn’t going to “die” as a result of AI. In fact, quite the opposite. AI is going to exponentially increase the number of companies that want to produce content. It will just appear as though opportunities are vanishing because a small number of AI-leveraged Content Writers will be able to take on ten times as many clients.
So, this Career Path isn’t going anywhere. It’s just changing.
And if you lean into it, and learn how to use AI, there’s no reason why you can’t be the one to capitalize.
In many ways, AI is going to change Ghostwriting the same way it’s going to change Content Writing.
There will be 10x Ghostwriters—Individual Contributors who leverage AI to take on many more clients than the average ghostwriter.
And there will be AI Agent Orchestrators—Ghostwriters turned Managers who develop systems that allow them to ascend out of the work and become solely responsible for quality control. (For example, I anticipate a rise in 1-Person Ghostwriting Agencies. No employees, just an army of agents.)
The fundamental reason why business owners hire ghostwriters in the first place is because they lack confidence in their own ideas. I know because I’ve ghostwritten for hundreds of incredibly accomplished CEOs, billionaire Silicon Valley founders, investors, Grammy-winning musicians, Olympic athletes, you name it. And the vast majority, nearly all of them, in some way or another needed help not just crystallizing their thinking but feeling comfortable sharing their thoughts, insights, stories, and perspectives online for everyone to read and judge.
So, will AI models and agents be able to produce similar quality work? Yes.
Could these business owners, founders, executives just “talk” to ChatGPT or Claude and clarify their thinking on their own? Of course.
But do they? No.
Because they don’t have the time to do it themselves, and more importantly, because even the most successful people in the world have a hard time getting out of their own way.
They are hiring you to manage them.
For the following reasons:
Reason #1: Demand for building a personal brand is only going up. Every single business owner, influencer, podcaster, coach, YouTuber, Silicon Valley founder, investor, and author is realizing they need to build a personal brand. Why? Because having a strong digital presence and a growing audience makes everything easier. It gives you leverage. It means you can acquire customers for free (and not have to spend any money on ads). It makes your career more lucrative and defensible. The list goes on. The problem is, all these people have a shortage of time. And so the only way to “scale themselves” online and build their personal brand is by working with a ghostwriter. Which means as long as demand for personal branding continues to goes up, so will demand for ghostwriting.
Reason #2: The entire point of ghostwriting is to create “differentiated” content. This is the only way to build a successful personal brand. You can’t stand out by publishing commoditized insights the way companies do with SEO blog posts. It just doesn’t work. So when a business owner hires a ghostwriter, they aren’t just hiring “a writer to write words.” They’re hiring a thinking partner. And the more successful the client, the more value they are going to place on the collaborative element of your work together.
Reason #3: Writing is only a small piece of the value you provide as a Ghostwriter. In fact, a lot of the value lives in all the tasks that surround the writing: interviewing the client, asking thoughtful questions, being able to do your own research, being able to expand on the client’s ideas, managing the clients expectations, coaching them through their own faulty beliefs and irrational objections, etc. The highest-paid ghostwriters in the world aren’t “the best writers.” They’re proficient writers, but they get paid a premium because they’ve acquired all the other necessary skills to manage and work with these types of busy, successful people.
The impact AI is going to have on the Copywriter Career Path is going to be somewhere between Content Writing and Ghostwriting.
Copywriting will be more defensible and lucrative than commoditized Content Writing.
But I actually think it will be less defensible, and potentially less lucrative than Ghostwriting.
The reason is because copywriting is all about writing things that “sell”—primarily ads, emails, direct response landing pages, and video sales letter scripts. And these “sales” assets are much closer to commoditized content.
For example, how do you sell “weight loss?”
You educate people on things that make them gain weight.
You educate people on the bad things that will happen if they don’t lose weight.
You educate people on the good things that will happen when they finally lose the weight.
And you motivate people to take action by showing them how their life could be different—if you buy the solution you’re pitching to solve their problem.
It really doesn’t matter what kind of weight loss company you’re running or product you’re selling. The “way” you sell weight loss is pretty universal—making it somewhat commodity information.
10x Copywriters: These will be Individual Contributors who use AI to create ten times as many ads as the average copywriter, but also learn how to use AI to produce new types of advertising creative. For example: creating video ads using AI-video generation platforms, or using low-code tools to produce beautifully designed ad graphics in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost.
AI Agent Orchestrators: Then there will be the Copywriters who ascend out of “doing the work” and into “managing the robots that do the work”—since the vast majority of ads will be able to be written by AI models trained on all the other ads that have worked for companies and products in the past.
Now, that said, I do believe the top 1% of Copywriters will actually fall into neither of these buckets.
This is where Copywriting and Ghostwriting differ. The world’s highest-paid ghostwriters are usually existing, successful authors and journalists—people like Mark Manson (who ghostwrote Will Smith’s memoir), or J.R. Moehringer, an American journalist who ghostwrote Prince Harry’s memoir. This is the peak of this career path, and these writers charge millions of dollars to ghostwrite books for celebrities, politicians, and high-profile CEOs.
But not tens of millions. And certainly not hundreds of millions.
Copywriting, on the other hand, is a lottery game. When played at the highest level, the world’s richest copywriters either build companies themselves OR get paid a percentage of the profits they deliver. These are the Tai Lopez’s of the world—entrepreneurs who master the art of creating differentiated, hypnotic ads and ad angles customers can’t help but pay attention to. And they generate hundreds of millions, sometimes even billions of dollars in revenue as a result.
These types of Copywriters aren’t going to be “replaced” by AI.
They’re going to leverage AI. They’re going to build teams that use AI. They’re going to capitalize on AI.
But it will be at their directive.
You should notice by now that AI is going to impact all the Writer Career Paths in similar ways, just with different path-specific nuances:
AI is going to give writers more leverage.
AI is going to increase a writer’s expected output.
AI is going to lower the barrier to entry and increase baseline quality.
AI is going to allow talented Individual Contributors to ascend to Agent Managers.
AI is going to unlock more, and more lucrative monetization opportunities.
And all of these things are going to change the career path of being a Writerpreneur.
In fact, it’s already happening.
A Writerpreneur who sells digital education on “how to” do something.
Or, a Writerpreneur who teaches people “how to use AI” to do something.
I’ll use myself as an example here.
I teach people how to start writing online with our cohort-based writing program, Ship 30 for 30. Sure, we also give people AI prompts, and provide some baseline AI education. But fundamentally, I am a writer teaching other people how to write. And I “make money” by packaging all my learnings into an online course for other people to use. I am monetizing “How To” do something.
But, another option, would be instead of teaching people how to start writing online, I could teach business owners “how to build an AI agent” to write online on their behalf. But this would be a very different type of education. I’d be talking a lot less about writing principles, and instead a lot more about AI frameworks, platforms, and systems.
So there’s an interesting divergence that is about to happen—across every form of digital education, in every industry.
Some people will specialize in teaching “skills,” and it will likely become a baseline expectation for them to include or speak to how AI can be used in conjunction with those skills to be successful, more efficient, more profitable, etc..
But other people will specialize in teaching “meta-skills”—how to train and leverage AI to accomplish a task instead. These customers will be less interested in learning “How To” do something themselves, and more interested in learning how to build an AI-powered system to do it for them.
My awareness of this mega-trend is half the reason why I started Write With AI. Because as much as I am a purist and feel strongly it’s important for people to learn the fundamentals of writing, I’m also aware that a large number of people just want to “skip to the answer” and have AI do it for them.
And I’d like to be able to serve both types of customers.
“Do I want to teach people how to do something themselves? Or do I want to teach people meta-skills and how to use AI to do it for them?”
Both have plenty of potential. And education that has nothing to do with AI (like gardening, dating, or yoga) isn’t going anywhere.
They’re just different types of customers.
Lastly, how will AI impact the career path of being a Category Copywriter—aka a very expensive messaging consultant?
A lot, and not at all.
In this career path, AI is going to be less of a “replacement” and more of a brainiac assistant happy and willing to work on your behalf 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. It will be your researcher, capable of doing detailed market analysis. It will be your spreadsheet number cruncher, your presentation builder, your fact checker. Most of all, it will be your thinking partner.
Because the truth is, even if you trained an AI model on your own Category Copywriting principles and frameworks capable of doing everything you do, that’s still not why companies hire consultants. (This is something a lot of people don’t understand.) Companies don’t hire smart people to give them the answer. They hire smart people to give them conviction in an answer—and to stand by it no matter how many objections get thrown their way.
Because the truth is, no “message” in and of itself is perfect. There can be multiple right answers. Which means what a company is really buying (from you, the Category Copywriter) isn’t the perfect and only answer. What they’re buying is your individual taste: an answer you feel strongly is correct-enough, and when stress-tested by the executive team’s fears and questions and uncertainties, doesn’t break.
I actually think yes.
There will come a time when the world’s most successful companies trust AI models more than they do the taste of world-class writers, designers, and consultants.
But it’s important to understand society is going to have to undergo a massive rotation before this becomes conventional wisdom. Right now, we can barely trust robots to successfully perform 100% of an entry-level task—like answer customer support emails. And so, regardless of how smart these AI models become, however quickly, it’s still going to take society a good while to trust robots more than humans.
Especially when it comes to the entire messaging strategy of a multi-billion-dollar company.
With all the above in mind, net-net, I believe now is the greatest time in history to be a writer.
Yes, AI will change what it means to be “a writer”—and it will change each individual Writer Career Path in different ways. But AI won’t destroy these career paths, replace writers, or render the craft of writing obsolete. In fact, quite the opposite. AI is going to be a brutal forcing function for everyone to become a writer—because writing, clarity of thought, and the ability to articulate your desired output is a prerequisite to use any of these new consumer AI models.
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