AI Makes You Better at Something That Doesn't Matter
AI made everyone faster. More content. More everything. All built by the same rules, optimized by the same systems. Somewhere inside all that, there's still a signal only you can send.
Furiously pushing those furry brown feet faster, making the golden wheel blur. What’s the difference between the wheel and the hamster? Both stay in the same place, while moving. Bored or stressed, hamsters seriously love the wheel.
Turn off the video, back to doing AI in 2023. Feels like I’m hugging air as I prompt and reply – up, down, and around Claude’s answers. Like I’m hunting for ideas, maybe make more content. Problem is there are plenty of ideas.
Even AI doesn’t answer the hardest problem: no one is paying attention.
What step am I missing that keeps me falling behind?
It’s too simple to believe. All this content speed overwhelms people. Like me, they pile it on social media so much, we know it’s not social.
AI increases the volume of content, which makes attention scarcer. Vibe code your way out of that.
Feelings? Nah. I’m spinning.
Running Faster, Going Nowhere, Feeling Good
For 2 years I poured every ounce of my energy and heart into the AI Optimist podcast, following the ChatGPT craze. Testing ways to work with AI to produce content.
Writing, performing and editing my own videos – more outlined than scripted. Let AI improve my editing and help me create an article from my spoken words.
I didn’t miss a week in over 18 months.
My signal wasn’t clear.
I was fishing for ideas in the AI soup. It was like I could do anything. And anything is what I got.
When I shared the creators’ side, the techs disliked it. When I shared the tech’s side, the creators disliked it. And neither returned.
Everything AI was blowing up, people quickly built huge followings. Famous people and people making content out of what famous people say. AI-generated content people called slop and still went to the top of…pretty much everywhere.
I’m not famous and I wasn’t expecting it to explode, but when it’s so quiet you can hear the crickets? Silence lacks comments.
I asked Claude who responded: do you have a friend to talk this over with? That’s when I started testing out some avatars. New. Not me.
Use AI to create more, use AI to sort what you created, use AI to figure out what matters from what AI sorted.
Version 1 avatar was me, raw and creating live. Nope. That one quickly fell to Version 2, Interview avatar. My guests are great and the shows were good, but when I did my podcast alone, the show did better.
My wheel stopped.
AI makes you more productive at something that doesn’t matter.
And the cost isn’t burnout or wasted time — it’s that you disappear. Not dramatically. Quietly.
You get replaced by the avatar version of yourself that the loop requires. The optimized you. The distributed-across-five-platforms you.
Everyone’s racing to produce more and landing with less. Your content was your signal. The problem is the system can't tell the difference. The loop doesn't reject signal. It drowns it.
We have edges machines don’t, notched from the years like rings in a tree.
Find what no AI could ever reveal: you.
What’s the signal only you can send?