Strategy & Story: The Only Two Things AI Can't Commoditise

Changing Your Ending in the Age of the Machines

🚀 Monday Motivator #002: Start your week with a positive mindset

Image credit: Loz James in Canva

My Medium friends can read this article over there as well..

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

— C.S. Lewis

I’ve been a copywriter for over 25 years (yes, I’m getting on a bit).

In a quarter of a century, I’ve weathered every industry shift, from the rise of content mills and the influx of cheap overseas labour, to clunky SEO “article spinners” and social media hype.

Back then, the path was clear: be better than the noise. If you wrote with soul and precision, it was easy to differentiate yourself as a human expert.

But the last two years have been alarmingly different.

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The rise of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude represents the single most disruptive shift I’ve ever seen.

Indeed, we’ve reached a point where machines can produce “perfectly fine” boilerplate content in seconds.

It’s bland and hollow, but it’s turned basic writing into a commodity, making it harder than ever to charge a premium for your craft.

Many writers - both those selling information and/or services - are looking at this landscape and thinking about giving up.

I’m not one of them.

We can’t go back to the pre-AI era, as much as I’d like to. That “beginning” is already written. (Hell, I’d love to go back to the pre-digital era, but that’s another story).

So what can we do as writers unsure about the future?

Like C.S Lewis says, we can start exactly where we are today and change the ending of our story.

We can do this by evolving in two distinct ways:

1. If You’re a Service Provider: Pivot From Writer to Strategist

If you’re writing for clients, you can no longer just be a “word generator.” If you compete on volume or speed, the machine wins every time.

To change your ending, you must become a strategist.

Clients don’t just need copy; they need to know where to put that copy to get more clicks and how to use it to make more money.

Your experience isn’t just in your fingers; it’s in your brain. You need to pivot to provide the high-level strategy that ensures client content actually performs.

2. If You’re a Creator: Move From Information to Authority

If you’re building a creator brand and selling info-products (like most of us here), the “boilerplate” era is your biggest threat—and your biggest opportunity.

Because AI can churn out generic “How-To” guides, the value of raw information has dropped to zero.

To thrive, your products must be infused with your personal story.

AI hasn’t lived your life, made your mistakes, or celebrated your wins. Your unique experiences and your specific “voice” are the only things that can’t be commoditised.

People buy info-products to solve a specific problem. They want the human perspective and proven roadmap of someone who has actually been there.

The Hero’s Pivot

If you feel like the influx of AI has knocked you off course as a writer, then remember: the middle of the story is where the hero pivots.

This means it’s time for you to stop looking backwards and act on moving forwards.

Stop competing on the things a machine can do for free, and start leaning into the things only you can do: strategy, story, and connection.

In that sense, we are all exactly where we need to be - starting exactly where we are now.

So let’s write an ending for ourselves that no algorithm could ever replicate.

Then we can all be heroes.

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