AI-powered shortcut seekers are losing

Your AI-enabled laziness is showing

I read a piece on SiliconAngle connecting the dots between generative AI and the DotCom crash of the early 2000s that rizzed me up to hammer out this week’s newsletter on AI Copywriting Pro.

And it brings to mind what I believe is one of the hairiest problems for people struggling with AI tools:

(Wrongly) using AI to take shortcuts in their work.

Real gains are not shortcuts. And I'm going to explain why shortcuts are a huge contributing factor to what many believe is an AI skills bubble.

Economic bubbles are a mass-scale accumulation of people cutting corners and behaving poorly.?

We're seeing this "AI skills bubble" emerge as copywriters and marketers rush to use AI tools to take shortcuts. Using AI to take these shortcuts is actually building skills in the wrong direction. It's making their work much worse (and more difficult) in the long run.

AI is throwing a lot of marketers and copywriters for a loop about their skills. You've got AI companies raising tens of billions of dollars and proclaiming they're going to automate everyone away – and the whole conversation is happening in the wrong context.

The article was about economic bubbles popping, much to the industry's short-term detriment but long-term advantage. That's exactly what's happening with AI skills right now. When this bubble pops (and it will) it's going to separate those who've been relying on AI crutches from those who've been using AI to enhance their core skills.

For example…

AI-generated summaries promise to dumb down the essence of a passage of knowledge for the sake of efficiency.?

Any copywriter / marketer who has asked ChatGPT or Claude to summarize info for them quickly realizes the models omit so much rich detail. That rich detail is the gold. And your job is to take the rich detail and turn it into great copy / content / ads / campaigns.

That just simply is not going to last because over time people are going to notice the quality of their work going down, clients not hiring them anymore, more frustration with the work they put out, etc.

And the AI industry (at least for martech tools) is still figuring out how to turn hype around the new technologies and breakthroughs into sustainable business models that last for the coming decades. A tall order indeed that will take nothing other than hard work, time for markets to select which products get to stay, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent to capture the market share.

And as copywriters & marketers looking to build maximum long-term leverage with LLMs in your businesses & careers…

It pays to study a little tech history.

A gold-chained and non-lizard Mark Zuckerberg cited in an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang about how during that time of the Dot Com bubble burst a lot of fiber was laid that ended up being really useful in the long run.?

Hype was high, companies were overspending and overbuilding because they recognized the scale of the opportunity of the web.

The dot-com boom wasn't simply pets.com and Kozmo.com flameouts. Amid the chaos, something actually useful happened.

Companies like Global Crossing and WorldCom went on a fiber-optic cable laying spree. Like right now’s “overspending” and “overexperimenting” and “overbuilding” on AI models, people in 2000 considered it massive overkill - so much unused fiber they called it "dark fiber". At the time, it looked like peak dot-com stupidity.

But that "stupid" overinvestment accidentally built the backbone of the internet that was to come a few years down the line.

When internet usage exploded, when cloud computing took off, when Netflix killed Blockbuster, and when remote work became a thing – all that "excessive" infrastructure suddenly became critical.

This accidental foresight laid the groundwork for the global internet infrastructure we rely on today. What everyone mocked as wasteful turned out to be a strategic asset that's still paying off.

Sometimes, the market's short-term idiocy creates long-term value. The fiber frenzy is a prime example. Keep that in mind next time you're quick to judge "irrational" market behavior.

As a marketer or copywriter, don’t be afraid to over-invest in your AI learning curve right now. True skills can’t be wiped out in an afternoon.

You can’t simply “lose it all“ when you focus on developing the actual skills that are going to last. This newsletter is not too specific. It’s a lot of mindset strategy, understanding the core technology and focusing on the skills and abilities and education and learning. And applying that to your copywriting and marketing.

Infrastructure lasts, hype bubbles pop.

Quality skills sustain, shortcuts just add to the Dead Internet.

Ok let’s look at a (very unsexy) example

This is the article that inspired me to write this newsletter edition. When I saw it online I was in the middle of client work but knew I wanted to read it for later. I like to consume my information passively.

Usually on walks or during workouts or when I’m just doing work around the house. I could have summarized it in GPT and missed the critical nuance that informs this article. But instead I chose to drop it into my Reader App so I could listen to the full extent of it later on my walk.

The Reader App… is AI. But it’s not a sexy marketing story to just say “Hey, take articles and drop them into this mobile app that uses really simple text-to-speech tech and choose a voice.” But that’s a really great use of AI for all the people who might not love to read on a screen but love to listen to audios. It’s a huge unlock for people like me who prefer to listen while walking and the article is only available in text online.?

Point is, I would rather be dangerous in a select few AI tools over a long period of time than an AI tool junkie that tries tools yet never gets shit done.

As Bruce Lee famously said…

Shortcuts show, and it hurts your sales, conversions, business growth and audience-building activities.

It's really not that useful for me to be prescriptive and I don't find that helpful by just providing endless little examples of what works for me and my specific workflows.?

That's why I give the thinking and approach and understanding of AI to you so you can then apply that to your highly-unique and highly-specific situation (which is different from mine).

I’ll try to end on an elegant note here, you really just need to channel your inner Yoda with AI experimentation and…

See you next week.

~ Brooks