I remember fidget spinners. Do you remember fidget spinners? Those cool little three-armed spinning trinkets that came in different colors, and supposedly were going to be Le Next Big Thing? They were cool and quirky and unique. For about two weeks.
Until everybody bought one. That was the shortest-lived fad I’ve ever seen. I saw a guy who was begging people online to help him sell fidget spinners at wholesale prices. He had bought pallets of them, hoping to unload them onto desperate trend-chasers for a profit. And he went broke, as he deserved to. Because, by the time his fidget spinner crates arrived, the fad was over.
I also know numerous people who have built websites on the go-to starter-kit web hosts. Squarespace, Wordpress, Durable, et cetera. Everybody uses them because they’re cheap, easy, and user-friendly.
And I even know some people who have “used AI to build a website in 30 minutes,” whatever that means. That, to me, sounds more like a namedrop than useful information. Like when someone brings up a story about how they met Keanu Reeves that one time. All they’re really saying is “I met Keanu Reeves, please say that makes me interesting.”
Now that everybody has all these new toys, I wonder what the medium-term effects of AI are going to be in the sphere of small business. I have no idea.
The near-term effect, I think, is that everyone is going to have a decent-looking basic website that an AI coded for them dirt cheap (dirtly cheaply?). Every time I look at all these Squarespace, Wordpress, Durable etc. websites, they look like they dropped out of the same cookie cutter. Because, quite non-figuratively, they did. They’re shamelessly identical. All of them are decently functional and okay-looking, but… that’s kind of the problem. They don’t impress me — quite the contrary. All they make me think is “this person does not care enough about their business, or my user experience, to build a serious website.”
Clearly I do not represent the masses, so opinions may differ here and results may vary. For some consumers, this is perfectly fine. Taste, I guess, is a matter of taste.
But when things become so easy that they get universalized, it represents a low point in business and creativity, not a high point. Ask anyone who traded stocks through the ‘80s and ‘90s — “trend following” strategies worked, until literally everyone started using them. Then they stopped working. Because when everyone has the edge, there is no edge.
When it’s this easy for everyone to start a small business, everyone is going to. And we have. Everybody and their sister has a store on Etsy, and 90% of them make no money.
Granted, lots of Etsy sellers are simply enjoying a hobby — they’re not hoping to get rich.
In any case, I think opening a store online is a wonderful idea. Especially if it lets you do something you love over and over. It’s just a shame that so few are having any success with it, because everyone’s doing what they love over and over and everyone loves the same things.
So what’s the natural next phase of this cycle? It’s that business owners will have to get wildly creative and spend more time and money all over again, to differentiate themselves. It’s that serious business owners will not simply rest on the laurels of cookie-cutter commerce. Because not only is that incredibly boring, it’s also a great way to not sell anything.
All roads lead back to human creativity. Always have, always will.
The unbelievable ease and access to AI for small creative endeavors and commerce is going to make it so that those who aren’t willing to put serious money and effort into their brand are going to starve. In other words, AI-built writing and websites are going to compete themselves right out of the market. At least that’s what I foresee. Those who aren’t willing to take personal risks to build a brand are not going to have a brand. That’s a fundamental truth that isn’t going anywhere.
I have been part of 3 separate brand-building projects. One of which, obviously, is Square Man. And all of them required taking tremendous risk. They require committing to a voice and a style and seeing how the market responds.
It’s not as simple as putting up a website and waiting for the world to come shop or read. In order to build the Square Man project, I’ve had to be far more vulnerable and honest than will ever be comfortable for me. For instance last week’s post discussed my personal life in a certain level of detail. And I wasn’t sure how you would respond to it. But these are the things that I think are worth talking about. And I believe people would rather read something honest than something safe. And it’s the second-best performing post I’ve ever written. So thank you for that.
It could have gone much worse. But that’s the kind of risk I have to take if I want to build something that is worth something to people.
Don’t get me wrong, I think AI can and will be an extremely useful tool. For coding, or designing, or doing things like writing website copy.
But think about it — how seriously should the world take you if you aren’t even willing to write the text for your own website? Or if you can’t even put in the effort to build a good user experience? How seriously should you take you? If you can’t, or don’t want to, do those things, why be in business in the first place? Those are the foundational elements of selling something. That’s what being a business owner is. It’s helping people by putting your own effort into solving their problems. It’s using your own experience as a backdrop for connecting with people about wants and needs.
Our world is already made of abundant (useless) information. And we are about to be in a world where 99% of the “creative” writing is done by computers.
Where does that leave the writer, or designer, or the otherwise creative person?
The same place he or she has always been.
Amid a landscape of boring voices, identical podcasts, and cheap commerce, the true creative is still going to be doing what the true creative has always done: finding a way to differentiate. Finding a voice that sounds more interesting than other voices. Finding a way to tell a better story, or be more honest.
Here are some unique voices:
Walt Whitman poems are written in crisp, even sharp or tense technical language. On the other hand, the poetry of Robert Frost is written with a soft, pillowy charm that feels like sitting by the fireplace with a loved one. Why are we talking about poetry? Because AIs do not have mouths. So they cannot tell that those two styles, when spoken out loud, are completely different experiences. One feels like a speech, the other feels like a whisper. Computers can’t solve a problem that they don’t even know exists — namely, the experience of speaking language rather than just calculating it.
But you can tell the difference. You have an ability to see, feel, and solve problems that computers cannot. That other people cannot.
And it’s the same for the entrepreneur, with the universalizing of small business and the creator economy. AI is delivering a new helping of advantages to all of us at once, and therefore the only people who will actually have advantages are the people who make one. What it is going to do is show us very, very quickly who isn’t willing to put in the work to develop their own voice, their own brand, their own market.
I don’t necessarily think the creator economy is going anywhere. We no longer have to work 16-hour shifts in coal mines, so this is what we’re doing with our time. And that’s great. I want to see what people can create. People, not computers.
The way to survive in a creator economy is not to do what everyone else is doing and then “hope to get noticed.” The way to survive in a creator economy is to find out what you uniquely can do (by taking risks), and then do it over and over again until you’re the best at it.
And if you’re a reasonable person, you might think “but there isn’t anything I can uniquely do.” That’s how most people feel, and maybe that’s how you should feel at first.
But my answer is, yes there is something you can uniquely do. You can tell Robert Frost and Walt Whitman apart. You have an eye for interior design. You can sing and dance. You understand horses better than anyone else in town. You know how to drive stick.
If you’d have asked me 2 years ago if I’d have a blog now with almost 2,000 subscribers and a few pledges, I’d have said you were pulling my white, white leg. But here we are. I’ve found one thing I’m pretty good at: talking about hard things with people. Getting started was painful, and it’s still painful, and it requires me to be vulnerable. But I’m good enough at it that I feel I have a genuine edge.
So the point isn’t to give up on the creator economy and say “I can’t compete.” Because if that’s the case, then neither can anyone else.
The point is, nothing at all has changed with creators or entrepreneurs. We still have our place. We just have to fight for it, same as always.
Drink some water and take some risks.
JDR
“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.” - J.D. Salinger
Excellent piece!
You've written an interesting initial foray into the implications of AI for creators. Thank you; I enjoy reading your essays. In turn, here are a few follow-up thoughts of my own on the subject.
Many can create; many can differentiate. Many will be part of passing fads, and have their 15 minutes of fame. But those who are remembered, those whose accomplishments last, do not merely create. They will add value.
AI in 2023 can add value in certain areas -- creating text, answering questions where the answer is already known, generating images from text, etc. These applications are the tip of the iceberg. One of my hobbies is asking people in various fields --- the early 2% adopters -- how they envision using AI in their work places. Some of the answers I get are amazingly creative and game-changing.
However, near-term AI technology is limited in two key aspects: (1) The solutions it provides are the result of curated training, not direct perception, and (2) it lacks the executive decision making capabilities central to advanced sentience.
The value humans add to future businesses will, I opine, not be in the form of creative writing -- AI is capable of producing text that imitates the style of any well-known author/poet today provided it is instructed to write in that style. Elegant prose creation will go the way of hand-tabulated numbers with the advent of the electronic calculator. It will be in the content of that writing -- new conceptual ideas and insights, novel propositions, real world foresight based on current events, etc. Direct real world perceptions and organization of those perceptions into new theories and narratives are still unique to humanity, and it is in those areas that humans will continues to add value.