I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether my web design business, and Rebel Soul Media as a whole, is going to stand the test of time given everything that’s happening with AI.
Obviously, I’ve already butted up against AI as my competition in a sense. People hire me as an expert to help them work on their business, improve their digital marketing or design a website, but increasingly what I get back instead of their own human feedback is that they’ve put what I created through AI to see what AI thinks.
And that can be a really weird place to work from.
AI is trained on an incredible amount of information and it can absolutely be useful, but it does not know the nuances of an individual business or personal brand in the same way that someone working closely with that business does. It also responds to how the user asks the question and what information they give it.
So if I’m pushing back on a client because I genuinely believe something will work better for their business or improve conversion, but the client already has a different opinion and takes that opinion to AI, there’s a pretty good chance AI is going to validate the direction they were already leaning in.
Now instead of a client hiring an expert and having a conversation about the strategy behind a recommendation, we have AI being brought in as another opinion.
Sometimes that makes the work better. Sometimes it absolutely does not.
There is also the bigger reality that information has become incredibly cheap.
One of the things that used to set creators and marketers apart was the ability to create a lot of good content. Now everybody can create content, and they can create a shit ton of it very quickly.
That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good.
We can all spot AI slop from a mile away at this point, and there is understandably less desire among some small business owners to pay premium prices to work with a human expert when they feel like they can do a mediocre version of the same thing with an AI marketing assistant in their back pocket.
And honestly, some people are going to choose that route.
But I don’t think that means businesses like mine disappear.
There are still so many small business owners who haven’t adopted AI heavily and probably never will. Some of them are simply too busy becoming really good at what they actually do. They are putting their time and energy into becoming a better practitioner, service provider, artist, contractor, coach, photographer, facilitator or product creator instead of spending hours falling down the rabbit hole of learning AI and digital marketing.
Those people are still going to want to work with people like me because they don’t want another job. They already have one.
There are also people who are actively choosing not to use AI, whether that comes from moral, ethical or environmental concerns, or simply because they do not want artificial intelligence to have that large a role in their creative work or business.
And then there is another group that I think we are going to see more and more of: business owners who went hard on AI, only to eventually realize that their engagement dropped, their conversions weren’t improving and their business was starting to sound exactly like everybody else’s.
Because this is the thing I keep coming back to.
If you and all of your competition are heading to the same source to create your copy, your point of view, your unique value proposition, your offers and your content, eventually none of you are going to sound particularly unique.
And I’m already seeing some people come back around to wanting the human touch because they want to actually be understood on a human level. They want someone to listen to them, understand what makes their business different and help pull those differentiators out of them instead of generating another version of what everybody else in their industry is already saying.
So yes, I think my potential client base may be smaller than it would have been even a few short years ago.
But I also think that could end up creating a much clearer client pool for me, filled with higher-quality leads and more of the people I actually want to work with.
I use AI too, so I’m definitely not here to completely poo-poo it.
What has changed for me is how I use it.
I’m using it less and less as a content creator and much more like an organizational virtual assistant. I use it for backend tasks, tech challenges, organizing information, troubleshooting and some of the mundane pieces of running a business that I don’t necessarily need or want to spend hours figuring out myself.
Where I’m becoming much more protective is around the forward-facing creative work.
And part of that comes from noticing what my own early adoption of AI has done to me.
I started using AI several years ago, and if I’m being completely truthful, I think relying on it too much did have an impact on my creativity.
I’ve noticed that my creative juices take longer to get bubbling and flowing than they used to.
If I spend too much time on my computer relying on AI to help me work through the backend of my business, I have a much harder time sitting down afterward to write chapters of my books or come up with creative ideas for my own marketing.
I don’t think that’s an insignificant thing.
A lot of us have started using AI for almost everything. We use it as a sous chef in the kitchen. We ask it to troubleshoot appliances. We ask it to plan trips, organize our schedules and solve problems that once would have required us to figure something out ourselves.
Some people are even using it as a therapist, which I personally do not recommend.
We’ve integrated it into our lives incredibly quickly, and I think it is worth asking what gets weaker when we stop exercising certain muscles ourselves.
For me, one of those muscles is creativity.
I don’t want to lose the ability to sit with an idea long enough for it to become something interesting. I don’t want every half-formed thought immediately completed for me. I don’t want to outsource the part of my work that comes from my lived experience, instincts, opinions or the weird connections my own brain makes between things.
And the more AI becomes part of everything around us, the more convinced I am that there is still a very strong case for human connection, human touch, human interaction and human creativity.
Maybe even a stronger one than there was before.
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