Short-Form Content

​

​

Long-Form Content

​

A Letter to Creatives | LinkedIn 
 

Great writing used to mean great observation. Before even beginning an article, you’d have to take notes on what you observed: the setting, the people involved, the event taking place. Whatever you noticed through your senses could help inform your article: the frayed lining of the shop owner’s collar, the scent of frying onions and stale bread in a musty apartment, the deep cold biting into one’s bones during a storm. All this, my journalism professors taught, helped craft a story that would speak directly to the heart of a reader. The words, not cranked out by machines nor hastily slapped together without thought, meant something. And not just the words but the writer behind the words.

Joan Didion, John McPhee, Truman Capote, and John Krakauer all wrote about real life in that spirit. Literary journalism lifted a magnifying glass to the real world that we inhabit but brought the literary elements that captured attention.

That type of writing, coupled with the fast-paced “must-meet-the-tight-deadline” sort of reporting training, meant that I fit easily into the world of online writing.

At least, for a long time, I have.

With the emergence of AI, I see a decline in that love of observation and the passion for story. Worst of all, the love of humanity, which is at the heart of all good writing, is being lost as well.

The love for people—our triumphs, struggles, comeback stories, redemption arcs, our sorrows—cannot be written by computers. No matter how much we train the robots to speak like us, to use our words, to phrase things like us, they are not us. They do not, after all, possess a heart.

That lack of heart is resulting in a lack of fire that is spreading like a frost in the creative landscape. The writing is growing cold, a step away from our humanity and more to the metallic unfeelingness of code. Our insights, which differentiated us from other living things, are being pulled from laptops and cellphones instead of our own experiences and observations. And the result is in a monochromatic world of writing, where all writing looks like everything else.

But AI can make us write faster, advocates say. We can train it to do the mundane. We can teach it to extract information so much faster than before. It can do everything that is dull and that takes away from our valuable time.

I argue that those mundane tasks are what help shape the more important ones. If I don’t know how to do a basic email, how am I to write an article? If I don’t know how to write a headline, how can I write a compelling lead sentence? In every type of work—chef, auto mechanic, nurse, therapist, veterinarian—people need to know how to do the basics before they do more intricate work.

Writer Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”

Why? Because of the experience behind it, all those little tasks that led to monumental experiences.

However, in today’s climate, we’re moving further and further away from valuing personal experiences and putting a greater emphasis on speed. At the stone altar of speed, we’re sacrificing beauty and truth, two things that AI cannot give us and only people can really create or value.

In writing this, I am not trying to hold back the already existing deluge of AI work that exists. I am not covering my head over my ears and decrying it all. I am not saying it cannot be used as a helper for creatives. What I am decrying is how it is being used to replace people completely in some companies. What I am railing against is how many people are being forced to train robots to eventually replace their own work all for the sake of speed.

But to rally against something is also to rally for something as well.

And so, I urge creative folks, all you brilliant and thoughtful people, those who paint or write or draw or design or do anything with a sliver of imagination, to ask yourselves what you can bring to your craft that no one else can. How can you approach an article, a graphic design, or video that differs from everyone else? What beauty, even if it is in just one shining sentence in an essay, can you produce that no one else can because you are unique and wonderfully made?

I ask you: What have you written or made that no one else can? How has your own experience shaped your work?

​​

​

People Who Inspire Us: Ingrid Ulrich, Domestic Abuse Survivor, Cancer Fighter & Adventurer Extraordinaire
Goal: Showcase the company’s philanthropic side
Format: Writing series: Part 1, 2, 3, and 4
Supporting content: Webinar, podcast guest, and slideshow
What I did: Created a content campaign for the Ingrid series. Put together creative briefs for each aspect of the campaign, interviewed Ingrid via translator, wrote the articles, edited, published, and distributed content
Read article.

​

How to Update Your Evergreen Content in 7 Easy Steps

Goal: Rank for the term "evergreen content" ahead of the competition. Have the article serve as a sub-pillar page for publishing.
Format: Article
Supporting content: Social posts. Also served as a basis for a marketing video.
What I did: 
Read article.

The Mind Games of Gaslighting: Part 2

Goal: Create a sub-pillar page for emotional child abuse. 
Format: Article.
Supporting content: Infographic
What I did: Researched, dug into Semrush for keywords, wrote, edited, and published the piece.

Read article.​​​​