Personality Content

The rise of AI does not mean the fall of all content, and certainly not the skill of writing. The rise of AI means the fall of Commodity Content, forcing writers and creators and thinkers across every industry to elevate out of the lowest-leverage, lowest-value form of writing.

• You cannot write Commodity Content better than AI, because AI has access to infinite information and you do not.
• You cannot write Commodity Content faster than AI, because AI can process and produce information at 70% the speed of light, whereas you are bottlenecked by the speed of your human brain connected to your human fingers (or voice).
• You cannot write Commodity Content cheaper than AI, because AI can work every minute of every day without stopping, whereas you cannot.

So, as the saying goes, “If you can't win the game, play a different game.”

Personality Content is the context that surrounds Commodity Content and gives Commodity Ideas increased (or decreased) perceived value. If Commodity Content is the “what” or “how,” then Personality Content is the “why.” It is the writer, creator, speaker, thinker, revealing personal details about who they are, how they learned what they’ve learned, and why they possess the opinions and beliefs and perspectives they do—which, in turn, amplifies the meaning and perceived value of their Commodity Ideas, and the Commodity Content that is fundamental to every topic and industry.

For example, you are more likely to heed the advice, “Don’t trade stocks with leverage, just buy the S&P 500 and hold for a decade” when it’s said by a certified financial advisor rather than a 23-year-old so-called day-trader on TikTok. Not because this is a differentiated insight (it’s not, many people have said it with varying degrees of credibility), but because of the context that surrounds the advice. Your credibility, your personal experience, your Personality is that context.

But, you are even more likely to heed this Commodity Advice when the financial advisor adds even more personal experience, more context, and Personality to their writing. This means going beyond their implied credibility (“a financial advisor wrote this”). For example, they might say, “Don’t trade stocks with leverage. This is a mistake I made when I was in my early-20s on Wall Street, before I went bald from stress. The most reliable way to build wealth is to just buy the S&P 500 and hold for a decade.” If you look closely, you will see the Commodity Content (the advice itself) remains unchanged. What has changed, and what makes the “content” more compelling is that it is now surrounded by Personality Content (we know this financial advisor is speaking from experience because he is admitting he has gone bald from stress). And the more Personality Content we add—the more stories, specific details, and deliberately chosen vocabulary—the more differentiated the whole piece of writing becomes (Commodity Content + Personality Content). So much so, that when pushed far enough, a strong piece of Personality Content by someone less credible can oftentimes outperform, command more attention, and be more enjoyable to read than a piece of Commodity Content by someone with immense credibility and no Personality. Scroll any social platform or major publication and you will see that more-personal Commodity Content almost always outperforms less-personal Commodity Content, meaning the details shared in the writing matter more than even the credibility of the author. And with the rise of AI, and the fall of Commodity Content, we should expect this divergence to not only continue, but accelerate.

Personality Content holds more “value” than Commodity Content because it is harder to replicate. The vast majority of human beings have not taken the time to write down or articulate out loud how they became themselves. They have not built a library of their life experiences: stories from their most formative relationships, mistakes made, lessons learned, etc. Which is why, when the average person uses AI, and AI hands them back a social post or newsletter or book chapter made entirely of Commodity Content without any Personality Content to differentiate it, they call it “Slop.” They don’t see themselves in it. But how could they? AI is a Content Commodity Machine. It does not know you. And you, the human, have not taken the time to build your own library of human-generated Personality Content for it to leverage.

So what is the value of writing in a world of infinite text-based Commodity Content?

It’s writing the things AI cannot—not from a lack of skill, but a lack of context.

I have been preaching this idea for nearly two decades, but in the age of AI it is more relevant than ever.

The most valuable asset you can build for your life and career in the digital age is a library of Personality Content on the Internet. This is how you “scale yourself” out of the unscalable real world and into the infinitely scalable digital world. Instead of sharing one story with one person over one coffee meeting, and the same story with another person over another coffee meeting, you can simply write the story or insight or perspective once and share it with infinite people online across infinite “digital coffee meetings.”

Over time, this library of Personality Content becomes an open-source Digital Brain for other people to access without needing your direct involvement—one of the highest-forms of leverage. Your Digital Brain is unconstrained by geography, time, and the laws of physics, allowing you to communicate asynchronously with anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time.

You should think of this Digital Brain as a repository of human-generated content —written or voiced—that captures non-commodity variables:

• Life Facts: There are facts about your life no technology or Large Language Model has access to unless documented somewhere. Where did you grow up? How many siblings do you have? What did you study in school? What hobbies have you had over the course of your life? These facts might seem value-less to you, but in a world of infinite text-based Commodity Content, they become meaningful differentiators and signals of ownership. There will be very few, if any, other humans whose cumulative life facts are identical to your own.
• Opinions: What do you feel strongly about? What Commodity Content, in the context of your life, career, or chosen industry, do you agree with or disagree with? If you were going to argue with someone over something, what would you argue about? What would be your stance? Opinions themselves are often Commodities (“I think stealing is bad”), but what is unique to your Personality is which opinions you claim as your own through intentional association (which AI does not know, and cannot know without your involvement).
• Insights: After ghostwriting for 300+ industry leaders, I can tell you from first-hand experience that most “insights” people have are Commodity Insights. “The key to leadership is to be the first to arrive and the last to leave.” This is an example of a Commodity Insight. There is still value in Commodity Insights, especially for the masses and beginners new to an area of interest or industry. But what gives Commodity Insights “value” is your Personality—the examples and context you provide to add color.
• Stories: What have you experienced in your life? What happened? Where were you? How old were you? Who were you with? What did you hope would happen, and what happened instead? Each of us is an accumulation of stories, big and small, that can and should play a meaningful role in our digital lives (our Digital Brains, our Content Libraries, and ultimately our Personal Language Models), the same way they do in our real lives. But it is unreasonable for these stories, arguably the most important variables in our identities, to make their way into our leveraged-digital-selves if we do not take the time to articulate them in the first place. This is the modern-day, real-time equivalent of a grandparent passing before their son, daughter, grandson or granddaughter has the chance to interview them and accurately preserve their life. You must be that scribe for yourself.
• Lessons: And what have you learned? Every life experience forces us to grow in some way, and then we take those lessons and apply them to the next chapter of life. This is, fundamentally, the value of language—written or voiced. It is to entertain (through story), and to educate (through lessons), passed along from generation to generation.

These non-commodity variables are what make you and your writing “different.” And the more of these variables (or “personal details”) that exist inside your library of Content, the more unique your writing and the more differentiated your Digital Brain.

To make this explicit, imagine two people both write articles about how to cook eggs. The Commodity Content of this topic is universal and somewhat unavoidable: use a pan, add oil, cook, flip, eat. It is unlikely either writer will stray very far from these Commodity Ideas or Steps.

But then imagine both writers add some Personality Content, and both share they are single parents. That is one new data point, a new Personality Variable that instantly differentiates their writing from every other person writing about that same topic. But it is still only one data point, and surely there are many men, who are single parents, who write (or have written, or will one day will write) about how to cook eggs.

So next imagine one of the single dads writes about how they have a son, and the other writes about how they have a daughter. And the first dad tells a story about how he cooks eggs for his son every morning before school, and the second dad tells a story about how he cooks eggs for his daughter every day as an after-school snack. You can see how, with each new Personality Variable that gets added, each person’s writing becomes more specific to them, and more differentiated and unique relative to “the other.”

Differentiation, particularly when it comes to something as shared as language, very rarely, if ever, comes from a singular data point or lone variable—unless you have lived a one-of-one experience shared by no one else: the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong; the first African American First Lady, Michelle Obama; etc. Only that person can write the words, “I was the first man on the moon” or “I was the first African American First Lady,” which fundamentally makes those 8 words the opposite of a commodity, and very hard to replicate without lying. When AI does this, we call it “hallucinating.”

But for the rest of us, and the masses who have not achieved a one-of-one outcome, differentiation and more importantly, “ownership,” comes through the cumulative collection of our Personality Details—some of which may be shared, some not, but all together amount to a new combination. Music is a helpful analogy here. No composer owns any individual key on the piano, or even Commodity Combinations of keys (scales, chords, ornamentations, etc.). But the longer each grouping of keys, forming distinctive melodies, and the more groupings and melodies in a piece, the more its cumulative whole is seen as different and associated with that individual composer—in turn, creating ownership.