This AI boom has set off an existential crisis in me.

Some background: I’ve been teaching writing for the past six years. In that time, I developed frameworks for how to write well and a reputation as a good teacher to learn from. Partially because of the AI wave, I decided to stop teaching. It has only been four months since I shut down my business, but I can no longer imagine teaching writing in a way that resembles anything close to the way I taught in the past.

The reason is simple: The world of non-fiction writing has fundamentally changed, and many of the skills I've developed and built my career on are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The amount of expertise required to out-do an LLM is rising fast. For example, the quality of a well-prompted, ChatGPT Deep Research report is already higher than what I can produce in a day's worth of work on almost any subject.

The question is: What kinds of non-fiction writing will continue to last? Here’s a heuristic: The more a piece of writing comes from personal experience, the less it’s likely to be overtaken by AI. Personal writing, like biographies and memoirs, aren’t going away anytime soon. That's because people have data about their lives that LLMs don’t have.

Having a unique perspective helps too. This is Peter Thiel's famous interview question: "What very important truth do few people agree with you on?” If you have an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world, you don't have much to worry about.

The common thread here is humanity. People are also interested in people. Their stories, their struggles, their emotions, their drama, their unique insights into how the world works.

Want proof? Scroll back to the beginning of this piece. You'll notice that I pulled you in by talking about a battle I’m fighting. If you’ve read this far, it’s because you’re interested in my personal crisis. I haven't thrown any data at you. All I've shared is personal experience.

The point is that human interest stories aren't going away. It’s like how computers are already better at playing chess than people, but nobody watches live streams of computers playing chess and Magnus Carlsen is still a huge name. Writing will be the same.

So I'm not saying that all writers are screwed. Nor am I saying that we shouldn't teach writing anymore. What I am saying is that the number of people who can gain an audience for their writing and outperform AI has fallen considerably — and will continue to do so.

AI will be tougher on writers than it is on readers. Sure readers will have to endure some AI slop, but you can pretty easily avoid it if you're halfway intentional about what you consume. The challenge for non-fiction writers is that every piece of non-fiction writing now competes with the output of ever-improving LLMs and Deep Research reports. I'd say that half of what I read is now LLM-generated (and since time is finite, that means less of my attention is going to human-generated writing).

Given everything I’ve said above would I tell my writing students if today was the first day of class?

I'd start by saying that the bar has been raised. You aren’t just competing against other humans anymore. You're competing against ever-improving LLMs. Fortunately, those same LLMs can help you write better. They’ll instantly give you 80th percentile feedback on your writing, and you can talk through your ideas with them whenever you’re stuck. That's just the beginning, and only a fool would ignore these advancements. I'd also be willing to bet that major changes are coming for the fiction world, but I don't have the first-hand experience to speak about them intelligently.

When it comes to discovering ideas, I've also found that jamming with an LLM is more productive than doing it with most people I know (save for a few genius-level conversationalists). And I’m not the only one. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says: “The new workflow for me is I think with AI and work with my colleagues.”

There are things to love. There are things to hate. There are things to be excited about and things to be dejected about. I’m neither hopeless nor pollyannish. But my job as your teacher is to point you towards the truth of what’s happening, so you can see it clearly and make a game plan, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel.

Know this: What it means to be a journalist, researcher, academic, and full-time author is being rewritten.

You might be thinking: “So David, where are you taking your career?” I’m investing more into personal audio and video. I have a clearer sense for how to build a sustainable competitive advantage in those domains, especially because AI can’t produce high-level video interview content. And whatever writing I do will be more personal and opinionated.