Listen Up, My Info-Marketing Colleagues!
AI Is Going to Rock Our World… Get Ready!
Artificial Intelligence (AI) wasn’t much more than a curiosity for direct-response marketers and publishers (like me!) until very recently. But it’s fast becoming a real thing – something everyone in the information industry needs to pay attention to. And it’s not because it’s going to make all of us happier and richer, which is what some pundits are claiming. We have to pay attention to AI because it is going to significantly change the economics of what we’re doing.
I should not have said “going to.” AI is already moving forward with its inevitable, unconscious mission. It is making it much easier and cheaper to produce informational content. And it is doing so in a very user-friendly manner, so that anyone – even people without any AI experience or interest in learning about it – can do it.
The effect of that is already obvious. AI is drastically expanding the supply side of information marketing by allowing millions of complete amateurs all over the world to insert themselves into the arena and compete with the rest of us who have been in it for decades.
You may be thinking: “Okay. AI may be allowing some newbies to try their hand at what we do, but – given the knowledge and skill that we apply to it – it can’t possibly do it with truly creative work.”
Well, I’m here to tell you that, yes, there are undeniable limits to AIs abilities now. But my recent experience working with it has me thinking that there may be no limits to what it can do. And in fact, much of the high-paid “creative” work that exists in plenitude in the information industry now may be the first to be replaced.
AI is not currently producing the highest levels of creative and analytical writing that most of our best writers are producing. And there are good reasons for that which I’ll mention later. But from what I’ve been seeing in the last few months, it’s clear to me that AI is capable right now of producing B-level writing. And that’s not nothing. Especially when you consider that probably 80% of all commercial (i.e., paid for) writing is B-level quality.
With respect to writing, AI’s biggest handicap is how it’s designed: as a predictive machine that is always searching for the word or sentence more likely to follow the word or sentence that was just written.
What this does is bias the writing towards logic and common sense. And writing that is both logical and sensible is writing that is correct but also obvious and therefore unremarkable.
TS, a colleague of mine and an A-level copywriter, pointed this out to me several months ago. In response to my amazement at the many writing chores that AI does perfectly well and with lightning speed, he said that most of the copywriters in our industry are using AI now – but as far as he knew, none of the AI-generated copy was outperforming copy written by flesh-and-blood masters.
His theory on that was very good. He said that breakthrough advertising is almost always in some important way unconventional. It could be in the theme, or in the language, or in the writer’s approach to the subject, or even in the tone of voice. But there is always something about copy that blows away its competition that is uncommon.
As soon as he said it, I knew he was right. But he was talking about the capability of AI to write advertising copy today. The nature of AI is that it is a self-teaching and learning machine. It improves its skills, all of its skills, every day and hour and minute.
If you contemplate how many millions of ambitious people are already using AI to get into information marketing, it’s impossible to avoid the possibility (probability) that in the not too distant future, AI will be producing copy that will be as good as or better than the copy produced by A-level human copywriters And if that happens, what?
Am I the Only One Worried About This?
That’s the question I ask my colleagues when they tell me they don’t believe AI will ever be able to match what the best copywriters can do.
When they make that claim, I wonder if it’s because they don’t grasp the precarious situation they (we) are in. Or if it’s because they do understand the threat, but have no idea what to do about it, so they’ve decided to simply ignore it.
I tell myself that they could be reassuring themselves with an almost-always-true fact about technological innovations – that most of the time, while they do lay waste to some jobs and some professions, they stimulate alternative market needs and opportunities that make up for all the jobs lost, and usually expand the economy.
And I consider the possibility that I am wrong to worry about AI as a job disruptor and they are right.
If that is so, then reading what I have to say here may be a 15-minute waste of your time.
But what if I’m right?
If I’m right, you should not only read what I have to say but read it twice and think about it more than twice and get prepared to survive the future.
There is one thing that no one that knows anything about AI would dispute: AI technology is developing extremely fast – much faster than anyone believed just a year ago. And the speed at which it is changing is getting faster.
How Will That Affect Our Industry?
My prediction – well, I’ll call it an intuition at this point – is that we are at the first stage of a reconstitution of the market environment we’ve been working in for the last 20 to 25 years. It will render obsolete a good part of the marketing and product-development knowledge we have gained and many of the valuable skills we have developed – the important competitive advantages that have made so many of us so many hundreds of millions of dollars for so many years.
And unless we begin to act now, we could very well be left struggling and losing market share to the many smaller competitors that are coming online in droves every month as they figure out the new standards and protocols and move ahead of us.
What I’m Seeing That Worries Me
In the June 6 issue of this blog, I recounted some recent experiences I’ve had with small- and medium-sized companies that produce graphic art – everything from creating signs for local businesses to making videos for influencers and direct response marketers on the internet to making A-quality video commercials for TV.
And what has shocked me is not that so many of these businesses are beginning to incorporate AI into their production protocols, but that they are losing contracts and clients to much newer and smaller companies (and sometimes even to individual creatives) that are producing equal or better quality graphic products and selling them for a fraction of what they were getting just a year ago.
What I’ve seen convinces me that this area of the information publishing/marketing industry is at the early stages of a massive deflation in both the perceived value of the products they produce and also in the prices they will be able to charge.
I see the same future for the production of editorial and marketing content.
In fact, I just heard a story about a freelance copywriter who was given a contract for $10,000 to write one long-form advertising piece and supplied it, along with three variants, two weeks before his deadline.
I wonder how he did that!
Those of us on the content side of the information industry may be able to accept my view of the implosion of the graphic side of our business, but we are much less willing to believe that the same thing could happen to us.
And that’s because we believe that there is something in the work we do that is so high on the skill hierarchy of creativity that no mechanical system will ever be able to compete with us.
I don’t think that’s true. My secret belief is that the greater the amount of creativity required, the easier it will be for AI to eventually learn how to do it. But that’s a theory.
What AI Is Capable of Delivering Now
I know from personal experience and because I am working with content creators on a daily basis that AI is already being used for several of the most common content-creation jobs.
Doing Research: Most of the writers (editorial and copy) I know, for example, are currently using AI for research. It doesn’t take much experimentation to discover that research that would take hours without AI can be done in – at most – half an hour. And that’s assuming the AI user is new to the subject he is writing about and is thus not capable of giving AI all the direction it needs to produce what he’s looking for.
He reviews the 30-minute output and spends maybe another 30 minutes giving AI some corrections and directions (mostly things he could have done on the first round if he’d had more experience). He hits “send,” and in about 15 seconds he gets pretty much the equivalent of what he could have produced in eight hours the old-fashioned way.
Creating Outlines: Experienced writers know that they will produce much better work with much less rewriting if they start with an outline, however much they may chaff at doing it.
I’ve been using AI to write outlines for my longer essays and even, retroactively, for the books I’m writing. I’ve found it enormously helpful in providing structure for what I’m planning to cover, right from the start. And that, too, can save me a lot of time.
As with research, I don’t expect the first outline I ask for to be exactly what I need. But since I know I can give AI feedback on how to revise the outline, and get that done in a matter of seconds, I am now in the habit of generating two or three outlines before I begin a writing project, just to see what the possibilities are.
Fact-Checking: The speed at which AI can run through a 2,500-word essay or article and identify all questionable facts is almost scary. And since we know that facts can be spun in any number of ways, we can use AI to give us the facts we want and give us ways of presenting the facts we don’t want in a way that does not completely undermine our intents.
Editing: AI can also edit copy – and not just in the way we writers have become used to editing – i.e., spelling and grammar checks and FK scores and other ways of rating readability. AI can provide a higher level of editing, the sort you’d expect to get from a seasoned professional, to make your argument solid and even persuasive.
The one thing that, in my experience, AI cannot do all that well right now is generate text from the outlines that satisfies me. Because of the way AI works – i.e., looking for the next most likely word or phrase – the bulk of the text itself will tend to feel solid enough but hardly riveting.
So what I’m saying is that, right now, writers can use AI to reduce the time it takes to produce a middle-to-longish piece by between 20% and 50%.
And what that means to businesses that buy information content is that their expectations of how many dollars they are willing to pay for each word they purchase is going to come down gradually but significantly in the next five years, starting in 12 to 18 months.
What Will Change (Sooner Than We Think)
Here’s how I think all of the above is going to change the economics of content creation and the value of information in the years ahead.
Let’s begin by thinking in terms of Economics 101: supply and demand.
On the supply side, I foresee an exponential increase in the volume of published content – both free and paid. Consider these scary facts…
* In 2025, there are more than 4,100 Media Streaming Services, Social Networks, and other content providers in the US alone.
* The number of internet service providers is much higher, with nearly 3,000 providers, including those offering DSL, cable, fiber, fixed wireless, and mobile broadband.
* And how about this? In 2023 alone, daily AI-assisted blog production rose from under 1 million to over 5 million posts.
* But that’s nothing compared to this: The number of active bloggers in the US in 2025 is approximately 31.7 million.
* And by 2026, over 90% of online content will be AI-generated, (according to Europol)
* And finally this: OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo and Google’s Gemini 1.5 can already produce hundreds of pages per hour.
On the demand side, I don’t see AI reducing the public appetite for information, even though the literate world is already flooded with – no, drowning in – information. Even as I write this, I’d bet that the supply of information available for sale in the information industry is probably ten times more than the current demand.
And as I alluded to before, I don’t see any other industries popping up as a result of all this increase in supply. There may be something I haven’t thought of, but I’ve been trying to imagine what that could be, and so far, I’ve got nothing.
What I do see, thanks to AI, is a gradual increase in the expectations of information consumers. They will expect more than what they are getting now for less. And they will expect the quality of what they are getting to get better over time, just as their technological tools have gotten better over the last 20 to 25 years.
Specifically, I believe information consumers are going to fairly quickly become…
* Less trusting of information and advice they receive from sources they know
* Skeptical of information and advice they receive from sources they don’t know
* Leery of anything presented as fact
* Distrustful of visual evidence, such as videos and photos
At the same time, they will expect…
* An infinite supply of digital information/ education/ entertainment on any topic of interest to them for free
* Hollywood-level production values for information/ education/ entertainment presented in video formats
* Intuitive, one-touch navigation and ordering technology, including forms, queries, and passcodes delivered automatically, safely, and instantly by AI
* One-touch, hyper-helpful and friendly AI-driven customer service, including order taking, complaint making, and processing address changes, cancellations, and refunds
What Won’t Work Anymore
If I’m right about that, then a lot of the kinds of information we are publishing and marketing now will become less and less valuable in the eyes of consumers in the years ahead.
On the positive side, I see an advantage for information publishers and marketers that can produce more specialized, high-quality content that the small- and medium-sized producers will not be able to afford.
On the negative side, I believe that a great deal of content that is just good enough for yesterday’s information consumers will no longer be marketable.
Even some of the content delivery systems – blogs, vlogs, digital newsletters, and so on – will have trouble keeping up with consumers’ growing expectations.
What the Information Publishing Industry Must Do to Survive (and Maybe Prosper)
We need to rethink the nature and value of the information products we are selling.
We need to recognize that the market for “okay” level information is going to shrink as it becomes flooded with okay-information producers. And we must find ways to reinvent our products so that they provide better quality information at either the same prices we are charging now or more.
We must also recognize that in every universe of every sort of information buyer, there will be a large block of consumers that are going to demand “okay” and even “good” quality information in more quantity and at cheaper prices. But there will also be a smaller segment of the market (maybe 20%) that will be more than happy to pay considerably more for what they see as ultra-high-quality information. If we can acquire a fair portion of those customers, it’s possible that our profit margins may even go up.
And there is something else I believe we must do that is even more important than increasing the amount and quality of the information we sell. I think we need to figure out how to give our customers things that AI will never be able to give them – things like trust, respect, admiration, affirmation, comradery, intimacy, and hope.
How, you might rightly ask, do we do that?
Here’s where I have to look into my crystal ball. And what I see is that we need to convert our publications into something bigger and more inviting, into something that can deliver trust, respect, affirmation, etc.
Instead of just disembodied ideas and advice from distant experts, we need to provide our customers with environments – immersive, evolving, multi-platform digital communities where they can go not just for news and education and information and entertainment, but for identity, connection, and transformation.
We need to put our customers on journeys they are inspired to take, journeys they can take with like-minded travelers with the same world views and values, moving along the same road towards a common objective that is, for them, a worthy personal and social good.
These communities must also be populated with people whom they admire and trust. Not just as experts talking to them, but as fellow travelers they can meet, not just on a printed page, but on the community’s social media sites and, at least once a year, in person.
What Our Publications Will Look Like… If I’m Right About This
The following is, admittedly, speculation. But because we don’t know exactly what will happen, we need to speculate.
In the future (including the near future), our typical information product would contain three levels of information: superficial, competent, and masterful.
It would also have three delivery information vehicles: text content, audio content, and video content. (This is inevitable because of how efficient AI is becoming in translating text content into other media.)
In terms of the quantity and timing of publications, I think it will largely continue as it now: daily, weekly, and monthly content. I think that’s going to stay the same because that protocol has been tested now for more than 25 years and it seems to work universally.
Here’s how I think it might look:
* Daily free content focusing primarily on topic-related news
* A weekly essay or speech that reinforces the core belief system of the “community”
* A weekly Zoom chat between senior members that can be audited by all
* A front-end and several back-end advisories – as we do now, but each would exist within the context of an active community of users with direct access to experts.
And there’s one more big change that AI is going to make for information publishers and marketers…
The Enormous Potential of Using AI to “DOGE” Everything We Do!
For those that get to work on developing it now, AI has the potential to make everything we do easier, faster, and cheaper. That would include basic tasks and functions like inputting and tracking orders, processing payments, making bank deposits, issuing refunds, and all aspects of product fulfillment and back-end sales.
This is already being done by several of my clients and the early results are promising. Based on what I’ve seen, I expect operational costs for businesses like ours to drop by 20% to 50%.
That is no small reduction. It will allow us to significantly increase our gross profit margins or at least keep them where they are if the market demands lower pricing.
I feel confident that these changes are going to happen quickly. The last major shift – from print publishing to digital publishing – took a decade. The shift from human-driven to AI-powered content production (and reduction in overhead costs) may take just three years. And a good deal of it will start happening in the next 6 to 12 months.
Again, I may be wrong about this. But I may be right. And if I am right, or even half right, it behooves every information marketer and publisher reading this to begin preparing for the change now.
