At a moment when AI can generate enormous amounts of perfectly competent copy in seconds, some of the companies closest to the AI revolution are paying extraordinary sums for human communications talent.
Take a look at this piece in Business Insider a few months back. Anthropic tripled the size of its communications team last year. OpenAI has advertised communications jobs paying more than $400,000. Netflix posted a director of product and technology communications position with a salary range reaching $775,000.
Microsoft even launched a print magazine, calling it an “antidote to the ephemeral nature of digital.”
So much for the death of the communications professional.
But the numbers themselves aren’t really what interests me. The contradiction does.
We now have technology capable of producing more written material, faster and more cheaply, than we could have imagined a few years ago. Emails, articles, press releases, speeches, website copy, donor appeals, LinkedIn posts, CEO pronouncements — you name it.
Give AI a reasonably good prompt, and you can have a reasonably good draft before you’ve finished your coffee.
Reasonably good?
We are rapidly removing scarcity from writing. Almost anyone can now produce something grammatical, polished, organized, and professional-looking.
Which sounds like progress. And in many ways, it is.
The trouble is that we’re also producing an extraordinary amount of writing that sounds remarkably like everything else. Smooth sentences. Transitions that work. Impeccable grammar. Right words in the right places.
But it’s all dead on arrival. Not a pulse anywhere in sight.
This isn’t really an argument against AI. I use AI. Increasingly, most people I know who write professionally use it in one way or another. It can be an extraordinarily useful thinking partner, researcher, critic, and editor.
But there is a substantial difference between using AI to help you communicate and asking AI to do the communicating for you.
That difference becomes more important as the technology improves.
For a long time, one measure of a good professional writer was simply the ability to produce good copy. That was a real skill, and it still is.
But what happens when millions of people suddenly have access to a tool that can produce competent copy on demand?
The premium shifts.
It moves straight to judgment.
The judgment to know what is important and what Business Insider calls “slopaganda.” To understand the difference between sounding good and actually having something to say. To recognize when the obvious approach is the forgettable one. And to understand the audience well enough to know what will earn their attention.
That is a much higher bar than producing good copy.
And it helps explain why, at the very moment when words have become astonishingly easy to produce, companies are willing to pay so much for people who know what to do with them.
Netflix doesn’t need someone who can write a competent press release. OpenAI doesn’t need someone who can generate a bunch of LinkedIn posts. Anthropic certainly doesn’t lack access to artificial intelligence.
They need people who can exercise strategic judgment about communication at a very high level. And the more words we generate, the more valuable that judgment may become.
There’s an interesting irony here. For years, we writers and comms folks have worried that AI would make our skills less valuable.
But I think it’s more complicated than that.
AI is making the mechanics of writing accessible to almost everyone. That’s a remarkable development.
But it is also exposing how much of good communication was never mechanical in the first place.
Producing the words is becoming the easy part. Knowing how to use them to change a perception, strengthen a position, or move someone to act is where the real value lies.
