AI will never replace true creators

if you understand this, you're set

Most creators will fail in the next 12 months.

And that sucks, because the entire reason you started this was to pursue your interests, help others, and make more than enough money to have control over what you do each day.

You already know there's a coming content apocalypse. You see it everywhere. People are creating one-click content automations that find viral ideas, script videos, and generate AI avatars that are nearly indistinguishable from reality.

But to be frank, I think this is good news.

Very good news.

The internet has already been dead for a while now. 95% of the pump-and-dump content either goes to the bottom of the barrel (pure noise), is forgotten about in less than 3 seconds, or is consumed by people who you wouldn't want as a part of your audience anyway. There are still plenty of sane people who are begging for a sense of connection on the internet. Hundreds of millions of people.

There is a huge divide right now on the topic of AI.

Some people hate it and will unfriend you if they even catch a whiff that you've sent one message to ChatGPT. Other people love it and completely outsource their agency and thinking.

Both sides are the result of stupid, unclear thinking.

A new tool doesn't need to become political. You don't need to identify with and fight with either side, because that's a great way to give up control over the outcome of your life. If you are smart, you understand that you can pull truths from both perspectives, filter what's relevant based on your personal life goal, and blow past everyone else who can't stop getting sucked into ideological arguments. AI or not, that's how you succeed.

True creators will never be replaced.

Cognitive infrastructure

Stick with me for a second.

We're going to get a bit deep because quick and shallow solutions aren't going to set you up for success as we move into this turbulent future. You will fail if you do not have a deep understanding of what's going on.

Power and influence stem from people thinking toward a shared goal.

This is the entire mind game of life. When you're born, your attention is captured by your parents, then institutions, then corporations. Goals are injected into your mind to create your perspective, your behavior follows because you only see reality from one angle, and your identity is created through repetition and reinforcement.

Schools, political parties, companies, and even religions have a survival instinct just like humans do, but they feed on thought energy. They survive on the conceptual level rather than just physical. Attention is the root rather than just blood. Memetics vs genetics. The more people adopt the goals of these entities, the more those people act to maintain their infrastructure, and their identity starts to take the shape of it. If people stopped paying attention to these structures and their devotees, they would lose their power. So, it's in their best interest to enslave your mind while you are young and underdeveloped. And no, I do not believe this was a conscious decision by the elite, it's simply the nature of reality.

You can't escape this, but you do have to learn how to play the mind game, especially when creators are dealing with a brain-based economy.

The single fix to taking back control of your life is creating a personal life goal and protecting it from being replaced by the goal of another person or structure… or machine. When you develop your own infrastructure, you can give your thought energy to the beneficial people and structures that best serve your interests without becoming dependent on them.

"Dan, why in the world does this matter lol"

Creators are decentralized cognitive infrastructures.

The smart ones gain power by rejecting the default path, pursuing their unique interests, engaging in trial and error, and sharing their perspective in public, providing useful schools of thought that individuals can choose from to aid in achieving their personal life goals.

That's why AI is such a threat.

Individuals can, and are, replacing the single aspect of their mind that determines their success with random generations.

Context creators, not content creators

You don't follow creators for their content.

You follow them for their context. Their point of view. Their story. Their perspective. All of those shape how valuable the content is for the specific audience consuming it. And sure, you can get a quick dopamine hit from an entertaining 30-second TikTok, but we're here to create value and do what we love. Real brands that stand the test of time are not built on quicksand.

This is how the world works.

Think of a camera lens pointed at a vast mountain landscape. Now, lower the camera, change the aperture, and you see blurry grass with one crisp flower in the middle. Same situation, different context, vastly different content. Two creators can talk about the same idea, but their point of view is what makes it novel.

(This is also why your life sucks. You don't understand that changing your life comes down to changing your perspective. By changing your perspective, you can directly influence how the situation plays out.)

In a play, you have the scenery and script. If you change the scenery, the script changes with it, and even if the script doesn't change, the way the audience perceives it does. Two creators can niche down to fitness and help people lose weight, but they are going to attract different people based on their story. A former firefighter is going to attract first responders and repel soccer moms, because they relate to him. It doesn't matter how good his fitness advice is, soccer moms aren't going to pay attention.

The key insight here is that value comes from a point of view.

It comes from context.

AI does not have a point of view.

Well, it does, but it's in the form of a product called ChatGPT that is marketed to the general public. They shove the entire internet into a little zip file, give the model a personality, and make it addictive to the average person who does not have control over their mind.

If you were to ask AI to write a social media post for you, it can get it almost right, but what happens after that one post? You just keep pulling the AI slot machine, hoping that it spits out a series of viral posts that grow your audience? Where's the overarching strategy? The narrative? The personal life goal you are pursuing and helping others who resonate with it achieve? You are missing the foundation that leads to long-term success.

Most creators will fail because they think volume will save them.

They will learn the frameworks, copy what works, and use AI to pump out as much content as humanly possible. When it comes time to make an income, their efforts will drift into the void because money is a measure of trust.

Huge accounts with millions of followers are often broke. Their audience doesn't care about them because they have not created the cognitive infrastructure that others can support and benefit from. That's why people follow you. They want clarity. Your point of view provides a sense of order they can adopt, just like if they adopted a belief system for meaning or a job for finances, but you simply act as a stepping stone toward their own goals. The creator economy is turning into a new education system, economic system, and meaning system, but people actually get to choose who they trust, and they can leave at any time without being an outcast.

As we'll learn, this is where the art of prompt engineering comes into play.

“Context is king,” as they say.

AI doesn't have access to the context that makes you valuable, because it's stored away in your point of view. If you can skillfully pass off that context to AI, you decrease the randomness that will destroy both your mind and business.

Here's my real point and what we will learn soon:

If creators do not understand this, they will fail, and they would have failed even when AI didn't exist.

If creators do understand this, they will succeed, and they will naturally use AI as a tool that can amplify their efforts.

How to create your cognitive infrastructure

With more content comes more noise.

With the right context, signal starts to appear.

Over the next 12 months, we will see the internet start to split in half. There will be creators who generate endless amounts of content for everyone, and there will be creators who put out highly curated ideas under their personal perspective.

What do we call a person whose work is high-signal?

A person with taste.

A curator.

Someone who has built their own point of view brick by brick through trial and error in alignment with their vision (their personal life goal).

Then, they use that point of view to curate the ideas that deserve to be put out into the world.

Their body of work on the internet becomes a world for people to explore.

An infrastructure they can adopt.

1) Niche down on transformation

More content = more noise.

More noise = more chaos.

More chaos = increased demand for clarity.

Sure, AI has all the information you could ever want, but that only creates more chaos, resulting in more problems, which will only continue to increase the demand for leaders.

What do leaders have?

A mission.

A before and after. A frame.

There are actually people who write about productivity for lesbians. And that's fine, do what you want, but if you were to remove "lesbian" from the equation and focus on the problem they have and goal you can help them achieve, lesbians would still find their way to you because your personality shapes your point of view that shows in your content, and you would position yourself in a way that is perceived as 10x more valuable. Anyone can type "how do I be more productive" and find an answer. But a transformation is more desirable, and your point of view makes it so unique that a random generation or search query can't match it.

Another thing for my deep thinkers out there:

Nobody is scrolling social media to read your deep thoughts.

They're also not scrolling to learn a new skill. If they want to learn something, they would search for it intentionally on Google, ChatGPT, or Youtube. They don't log on a social timeline looking for specific information.

They will only care about your deep thoughts or that new skill if you persuade them as to why they should care.

How do you do that?

• Have an enemy to rally against – What way of life is the bane of your existence and how can you start to break people out of that trap?

• Create a shared vision to adopt – What ideal future are you helping people achieve? It helps to map this out in detail and remind yourself of it.

• Filter any piece of content you create through those – You can write about anything as long as your mission is a through-line that connects them all together, slowly increasing the value of your body of work over time.

The enemy creates a pain point. The vision creates a desired outcome. All content in between becomes pieces of a roadmap that people can dig into to get tangible results in their life, and since these results are based on personality, they stand out from generic solutions.

As an example this newsletter is called Future Proof.

That's my "niche."

Coming up with ideas because I can simply curate information I consume and do some mental checks to see if it aligns with helping people become future-proof.

2) Create a world for people to explore

Your niche isn't displayed in a one-line brand statement.

"I help ____ do ____ without ____" is a relic of the past.

Instead, your niche is illustrated by your body of work and those who are attracted to it.

Business now is less about countdown timers and sales funnels. It's more about building a world for people to explore. Like a personal Star Wars franchise with movies (long-form content), spin-off shows (short-form content), action figures (products), and the rest.

AI may be able to generate a great film at some point, but if that film lives in isolation without lore or further branches, its time in the headspace of its viewers is quite short.

You need to be consistent enough that people can binge everything you have to offer over the course of a week, because that's how people consume things now, and that's when you'll actually start making money. When one post of yours does well, they'll start searching everywhere to get more information.

If you post 10 times and quit, you have no idea how any of this works.

I wrote in more depth on how to do this in: "how to build a world" with a content ecosystem.

Now, you need to go about this in a smart way. Here's what I'd do:

• Find 3-5 accounts that talk about similar things you want to.

• Filter their content by most popular and note down 5-10 of their best pieces of content.

• Recreate those topics but from your own perspective and toward your own vision.

• Incorporate the fundamentals consistently. If you talk about writing, teach the basics of writing. Most people who follow you will be beginners.

• Read non-mainstream books and follow people with great ideas that aren't well-known. Take those ideas and spin them for your own mission.

And of course, write about any ideas that come to mind.

It helps to learn how to package those ideas so they can always do well (even if they're boring). Study the fundamentals of persuasion and media.

3) The 80/20 of prompt engineering

AI is not just a chatbox that you type questions into.

The secret is to teach the AI how to do something very specific.

You can do this in one of two ways:

• Document your own creative and mechanical processes in extreme detail as if you are teaching a friend or employee how to perform that task.

• Reverse engineer someone else's success with AI and turn that into detailed instructions.

Prompts are systems.

Your mind is a series of nested systems.

If you can externalize those, you can both refine them and free up more cognitive bandwidth for higher-level thinking.

This means that most of your prompts aren't going to be 1-3 sentences. They're going to be detailed operating manuals for how to perform a specific task.

As an example, and if you want to outsource your thinking, you could ask AI to "Give me a list of ideas to write content about on the topic of productivity," or I could reverse engineer how my own mind comes up with ideas and create a prompt that reflects that. I program the AI with specific instructions to ask me the right questions, in a specific ways, that leads to breakthrough insights. This has drastically changed how I write, because the more great ideas I can come to, the more progress I can make, because ideas are the catalyst to progress in the creator economy.

The trap people fall into here is that they feel bound to the output of the generation.

Taste also applies to content that AI spits out.

It's no different from researching or learning via other sources. You can tailor what it is to your situation, but you still have to filter what's worth knowing from what's not.

This is one example of many when it comes to AI. I can download a YouTube transcript or PDF for how to write great copywriting, train a prompt on that, and not have to hire a marketer, giving me more power to pursue and sustain my own craft without spending a few thousand dollars.

Since this letter is getting long, I'll save the rest for another one.

– Dan