Like seemingly half the people on my LinkedIn feed, I was amused to see this recent headline in the Wall Street Journal:

(I was also amused to see that the Wall Street Journal people add a period after “Journal” in their masthead, which I had never noticed before and which strikes me as weird and unnecessary. But I digress.)

Humans are hard-wired to respond to stories. No child in the history of time has ever asked to “hear some content” at bedtime. We want a beginning, a middle, and an end. We want to maybe laugh or cry a little bit. We want a message. We want meaning and connection.

And if you are a business, even if you are B2B, your potential customers want to know how your story fits into theirs. Sure, they want the specs of what you do and how you do it, but they also need to know that you mesh with how they see themselves. And if you don’t pull this off, they’re probably not going to want to do business with you.

There is no shame in not having strong storytellers on staff. You’re busy running your business, and some of the most fascinating people in the world aren’t great at expressing themselves in writing. This is why professional ghostwriters exist. But don’t make the mistake of thinking you can throw some ideas into a prompt and get a really compelling story from an AI tool. You won’t.

You will get words, certainly – SO many words (ChatGPT often reminds me of a nervous blind date who just doesn’t know when to stop rambling). But they aren’t going to be words that resonate with people, or move them or – and this is key – incline them to give you their money.

Great stories tend to involve nuance, irony, suspense, surprise, humor, or some combination of these. At the very least, you need originality and creativity. AI is terrible at all of these things.

AI tools can generate text, sure. But they’re not good storytellers. Invite them to join you around the campfire at your peril.

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Steve Martin once said, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Cal Newport subsequently borrowed this phrase – minus the “be” – for the title of his terrific 2012 book.

It’s wise advice, and especially apt now. AI is increasingly good at a lot of things. It is not, however, astoundingly fantastic at a lot of things. It can’t be, given that anyone running the same prompt will come up with substantially the same output you get. And even the best LLM can never come up with something wholly, brilliantly new; that’s just not how they work.

The best job security I know in these increasingly uncertain times is to be great – legitimately, uniquely great – at what you do. If you are able to pull that off, and if what you do provides genuine value, you will always be able to stay afloat in even the most turbulent of technological seas.

I’m not saying this is easy, not by a longshot. It’s hard to take a clear-eyed, honest look at the value you bring, where you fall short, and what it will take to get better (similar to stepping on the scale after a weeklong food-and-drink bender on the Feast of the Seas cruise ship). It’s even harder to actually do the work to get there – especially if you’re cowering in fear and wondering when Hal is coming for your job.

It’s difficult, sobering work, but it’s worthwhile work. Your unique genius can never be stolen by a machine, not even a really sophisticated one. So it’s worth the time to hone your gifts to a level that is un-ignorable and irreplaceable.

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