Two years ago I started building AI tools to help me with tasks. Now, I’m leaning back into doing some of them myself.
Things that are too easy to do have no value. One of the few things I remember from the one economics module I took was that the price you ask will drop to your cost of production in a competitive market.
Work that AI does for you for pennies is only worth pennies to your buyer. You may imagine that your prospects will value the time and effort that went into crafting your prompts but really they’re thinking two other things.
- Can I do this myself for free?
- Can someone else do this for less?
The downward pressure is inexorable.
Let’s take one particular example – using AI to summarise documents.
A couple of years back I built a simple tool. It took pdfs, converted them to text, split them into segments that would fit in ChatGPT’s context window, and then automatically extracted the key points that mattered.
Not as summary – a distillation. The job was to remove the fluff and leave the facts and key strategic points.
The advantage – it was quick. The disadvantage – it did something that wasn’t really worth doing.
A document worth reading will already be structured in a way that does this for you.
An introduction or executive summary will lay out the key facts and points.
The rest of the text should only include information that is important and relevant.
The only reason not to read the whole document is if it’s badly written. The logical response is to ignore it, not use AI to summarise something that isn’t worth your time to read.
This is just one example – the lesson for me is do your own reading. And your own writing.
You’ll learn more that way.
I still use AI every day. It’s a powerful tool.
We just need to figure out what’s it does that’s really valuable.
Handcrafted insight 