The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI

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Stories<br>The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI<br>Jasmine Sun on why secrets, live presence, and a distinct voice matter more than ever in an AI-saturated world, and what independent creators need to build careers that machines can't replace

Jasmine Sun<br>Jun 02, 2026

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Jasmine Sun publishes jasmi.news, where she interviews AI researchers, eavesdrops at San Francisco house parties, and reports what she calls “an anthropology of disruption”—on-the-ground dispatches from how frontier technology is changing culture. At Substack’s recent Once and Future Media Forum, Jasmine shared her perspective on the comparative advantages she and other independent writers and creators hold in the age of AI: what skills are gaining value, which are losing it, and where economies of attention are going as a result. She’s the first to acknowledge that writers and creators hold a wide range of views—concerns, optimism, fears, curiosity — about what AI means for their work. But here she makes the case for why writers are better positioned than they might think, and what they can do to exercise that advantage whether they choose to use AI or not. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of her talk.

When economists debate the future of work, they often ask the question: what will humans’ comparative advantage be? I think the key to understanding what the future of work looks like is not, How can humans race against the machine, how can we generate slop faster than the machines can generate slop? but rather, What are the human strengths, and how can we understand what skills are going to go down in value now that AI has made them commoditized, versus what skills are going to go up in value because they are still scarce and because the machines simply aren’t very good at them yet? I’m going to introduce four ideas, or provocations, that have shaped the way that I think about AI and my own media career.<br>One: The value of summary will go down, and the value of secrets will go up.<br>Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public. The things that people have not said, things in whisper networks, the tacit knowledge, the open secrets that have never been put in the public domain—the journalist manages to pluck them out and make them public. When you persuade a source to tell you about some corporate malfeasance, or you venture to a remote town that few people have ever written about, or you sneak your way into a tiny underground party and talk about all the people who are there, you are working in a space where there is no training data.<br>That is what is really valuable. There’s a reason that robotic startups are paying thousands of people to strap little cameras to their heads so that they can fold T-shirts all day and try to take in the world from a human point of view. There’s a reason that data companies like Mercor are paying Redditors $100 an hour to write up their niche hobbies and explain the intricacies of being a knitter, or playing Magic the Gathering. There are all these details and tacit knowledge that you only know by doing, that AI hasn’t had access to yet because it’s just not in the data. AI can summarize, and it can remix information already out there, but it can’t see stuff. It can’t feel stuff. It can’t break news. And the thing that writers can uniquely do is all of that. You can go out into the world, and you can take that knowledge and you can make that public or you can sell it, and that is something that is really valuable.<br>Two: The value of static content will go down, and the value of live interaction will go up.<br>I don’t think we’re that far from a world where AI can take in any of our writing styles and replicate it to the point where your median reader will not be able to tell the difference, as long as you feed it the original reporting that you’ve gathered and some notes. And that is a scary thing. The thing is, though, that your audience does want to feel connected to you, and they want to know that a person is real and that you are the same person generating the text. There’s a reason why behind-the-scenes videos go really viral now. It’s because people don’t just want to see the final presentation; they want to see all the proof of work behind it.<br>For a solo creator, doing live interaction, events, podcast interviews, meetups and hangouts—these things prove that there is a life behind the voice. It allows people to make a connection between a living being and the words on the page and shows that the person’s point of view comes from somewhere. That stuff is going to be scarce, it’s going to be irreplaceable, and I think that most writers should be doing a lot more of it. Every time I do a big written and reported piece, afterward I block out about a month to just go to conferences, go on podcasts, and talk to as many people as possible. Some people don’t like that....