Neither interesting, nor valuable

It wasn’t that long ago when simply having a website made your business stand out. You remember, when we’d proudly say “www dot…” 😅

But it didn’t take long before technology made it possible for people to get a website online without having to know how to code. Then templates got better, hosting got cheaper, and suddenly everyone had a website.

That didn’t mean that websites became less valuable, but the bar moved, and simply having a website wasn’t unique, it was expected.

And that’s what I keep thinking about with AI.

Every day I see something new it can do… Write an article, design a logo, summarize a book, build a slide deck, turn a transcript into a beautiful PDF, or create it’s own AI-only reddit and plot the destruction of mankind.

It’s impressive that it can do all of these things, but I can’t help myself from doing some simple math:

• If it can be done easily, we’ll have a lot of it.
• If we have a lot of it, it won’t be interesting or valuable.

So now every time someone shares something they “whipped up with AI in 5 minutes”, all I can think about is how it’s going to be pretty worthless in no time. Not because it’s bad or unimpressive, but because we’re about to have an overabundance of it.

Erik Kennedy wrote a great blog post about why we need to focus on doing things that are “hard to do in Figma”, and I can’t help extrapolate that to every part of my business — not just design…

Of course AI could respond to all my inquires, which makes me think I should start picking up the phone and responding personally.

Everyone seems to be racing to do more of everything that just became easier, so maybe it’s time to stop and start noticing what’s becoming scarce.