Could AI Change Your Story?

Last week, I talked about the stories we tell ourselves and, for a change, I pretty much swerved the topic du jour, AI, which is rare for this weekly post.

But could AI change this story?

I talked about being a writer. If you were to rely on Claude for all your copy, would you still be a writer? Or if you are a web developer who "vibe codes" a website with AI, are you still a web developer?

And, ooh… on the flip side, if you "vibe code" a website with no experience, are you a web developer?

Pluck any aspect of marketing or knowledge work and automate the shit out of it, what story do you tell yourself? Are you now a robot wrangler (way better than a prompt engineer), is this a story to tell ourselves?

Or are you still a writer, developer, or marketer?

Arguably, in marketing, outsourcing cognition isn't new; some CMOs have been outsourcing their marketing brains to teams and agencies for as long as agencies have existed.

The story they tell themselves, I suspect, is not about being a gifted creative marketer but rather focuses on the Chiefy and Officery parts of the job.

Similarly, regardless of where you sit on the slippery pole of a marketing career, robot wrangling is now just as much a part of the job as managing an SEO agency.

So, to my question about the story we tell ourselves: if you know what needs to be achieved, you have the taste, discernment, and experience, do you need to be directly involved in the craft and hands-on with how the sausage is made?

This isn't the first time this has happened.

I once stood in front of a room of people, telling them that the CMS product I was demonstrating would remove the need for all the pesky HTML coding, and one voice from the back of the room said "But I like HTML coding."

This was the story they told themselves; they were not a content publisher, they were an HTML developer, maybe the only HTML developer in the team, with a warm feeling of being special.

I'd argue that having HTML skills is useful; I find it useful today, but is anyone really doing that as a full-time job now?

The story we tell ourselves has been constantly threatened by technology. AI is just the latest version of that threat.

If your story is about creativity, taste, and judgment, AI doesn't touch it.

If your story is secretly about being the only one who could do a practical thing, that's the story technology has been lunching on for decades.

As I said last week (paraphrasing Robert Rose), it's your story to tell; you decide.