Reader, I hope you’ve been keeping up with the developments in AI technology over the past year. Useful tools are entering the market very quickly, and they’re changing the way most of us work. This is absolutely worth paying attention to, especially if you’re a generalist.
Full-length novels are being written in a matter of days. The framework of a new business is laid out step-by-step. A new style of art is developed. A new style of comedic content hits YouTube. And so on. AI is going to continue changing our lives in ways we can’t predict, but one major change that seems to be playing out is that AI can be your specialist—an “employee” doing something specific under the direction of you, the “manager” of the project.
(Let me point out that although this post focuses on the advantages of recent AI developments, that doesn’t mean I deny any disadvantages. It’s true that AI tools are starting to replace human jobs, which is causing widespread agitation. I don’t say this disinterestedly—it’s likely coming for my job, too. The best we can do is adapt to the new status quo and prepare for what’s next.)
Employ AI
When you have a big idea that ties together many of different kinds of work, like a multimedia product or a business idea, at some point you need to recruit specialists. It’s more efficient and frees you up to focus your skill and attention on what’s unique about your vision. Find tons of examples of this in Things you’re allowed to do.
But what if you’re not confident enough in the idea? Not ready to invest your own money? Or maybe you’re worried you’d be a difficult boss to work for: too micro-managing to your vision. Maybe you’re worried about getting scammed by a stranger. Then you might wait on the project. You might find yourself blocked from ever making a minimum viable product.
Enter AI! You can “hire” AI to do certain parts of your project for you. At the time of this writing, AI models can do the following, at a level that meets or exceeds that of most people:
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Content that is the product itself, like blog posts.
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Content that aids the business, like marketing copy.
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Business communications, like cold emails.
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Use it to pore over customer feedback and extract key insights about your product.
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Visual content that is the product itself, like art for your book or website, or memes for social media.
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Marketing content, like the logo for your brand.
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Produce:
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Video content! This is still in its early stage at the time of this writing, but AI can generate video clips from just simple text prompts, and they look pretty good.
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Speak:
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AI Text-to-speech is often indistinguishable from organic speech. Use it for any narration you need.
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Program:
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If you’re a novice at coding, technical projects can take a very long time. But AI models are very good at writing basic code that does what you ask. A small skill base in coding plus AI lets you build out your technical projects much faster.
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Brainstorm:
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AI chat models can generate business ideas as well as sub-niches for your business. Try asking it what kind of project you should work on, given your eclectic set of skills.
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(I left out a ton of use cases. But even if I put together an exhaustive list, I know it would be out of date within a month. AI is moving that fast.)
(And, I’m talking about generative AI specifically here—AI models that create content. I’m not mentioning the myriad other AI tools that have been around for a while, that do things like help you search an index, tell you what’s in an image, transcribe audio, etc.)
Now, so far it’s been clear that AI models aren’t quite the best at the above tasks – they don’t exceed the skills of the best humans. But if you’re a generalist in the early stages of a creative vision, you probably don’t want the very best, nor do you want to pay for it. AI models will get you through the prototyping stage at incredible speed. And if current trends continue, future AI tools will put out higher quality work and be more seriously considered as real business assets.
I can’t overstate the degree to which this opens doors. Hey, I love writing, so I write all the content for this website myself. But if I hated writing and still wanted to do a project like this, I could! I could always partner with or hire a writer, but now it’s even easier: I could “hire” ChatGPT for free, or nearly free.
Leverage small investments
AI is a force multiplier for “dabblers.” If you have even a surface-level aptitude in something, you can make AI-generated work look excellent.
Some basic skill investment is required on your part, but only a bit, so that you can judge the quality of the work. If you’re just okay at writing, you know enough to say, “This sentence sounds weird,” and the AI will give it another try. If you’re just okay at art, you can say “This part of the image looks weird,” and have the AI redo just that part. Personally I’m just okay at programming, so AI programming holds a lot of promise for me. I’m good enough to check and edit code, but I benefit massively from an AI that writes most of it for me.
And this is terrific for generalists, who are natural dabblers. There are now fewer things you need to master (or hire masters for) in order to get your big idea out there. Dabble in all parts of the project, employ AI tools to do most of the work, and then verify that the quality is good.
Skip the overhead
With AI, you don’t have to worry about getting scammed. You don’t have to worry about whether you’re a difficult manager or whether your critiques are constructive enough. You don’t have to worry whether your idea is good enough to justify stringing someone else along. You can just start.
The casual CEO
Generalists tend to make great CEOs. That’s small comfort to most of us, because it’s hard to become a CEO: every company only has one! And it’s hard to found your own company—to be sure enough of your idea and its profitability that you’ll start paying people’s salaries.
In other professions, this is not the case. You could ask yourself, “Would I enjoy painting?” and then just paint a little to find out. Now, you can ask, “Would I enjoy being the leader of a project or business?” and then hire an AI staff and be a casual CEO and find out. The gate is lowered; “CEO” is now like many other professions in that you can just try it out and see if it’s for you.
Where to start
Here are some good AI tools that I’m aware of. I’m sure there are better ones out there, and I’m sure the list will change in the near future. But I still want to put out some practical steps for those who are curious and motivated:
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ChatGPT – generates text content; state-of-the-art quality, regularly improving
- Claude – also generates text content; competitive with ChatGPT
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Copy.ai – text generation specialized for copywriting
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GitHub Copilot – code completion and generation for all popular programming languages and platforms
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DALL-E – image generation from text prompts; easy to use
- Midjourney – image generation; considered to be the highest quality
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dreamstudio(Stable Diffusion) – image generation; greater variety of content possible
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Azure Speech – AI synthetic speech, including “personal voice” from an organic speech sample; also transcribes organic speech into text
Conclusion
Let’s get to work! The winds are shifting. The specialist-centric economy that was shaped by the industrial revolution is gradually giving way to a creator economy powered by the AI revolution. As a generalist, you are uniquely poised to benefit from it.