As AI becomes capable of writing natural and readable text, motivation to create output is gradually diminishing. Meanwhile, generative AI-based content that somehow feels “AI-ish” is actually increasing, which seems to further discourage the motivation to produce output.

In an era where asking AI can solve problems without you having to create output yourself, what kind of output becomes necessary?

Experience

One thing AI cannot do is accumulate experience. Whether physical or online, AI cannot build up experiences. When context is reset, all previous conversation history is forgotten, and conversations start from complete zero.

When writing technical articles, if we only look at “problem → solution,” countless pieces of content already exist, and this is what AI excels at most. However, your experience cannot be replicated. Why did that problem arise, why did you choose that solution, what issues occurred during implementation—the experience leading to the solution becomes unique content that only you can provide.

Emotion

What’s missing from text written by AI is emotion. If you have AI write a novel, it can produce content that includes something resembling emotions. However, in most cases, it will be superficial and somehow give off the scent of being AI-generated.

Even in technical articles, there’s plenty of room for emotion. The joy of success, the panic felt during the first trouble, the emotions gained from words of appreciation from others—there should be numerous opportunities that touch the heartstrings. Such changes in sentiment can never be reproduced by AI and become one-of-a-kind content that only you can create.

The Importance of Verbalization, Recording, and Delivery

When creating content that only humans can write, the key is verbalization. You cannot produce output without verbalizing the emotions and experiences you’re feeling now (or felt a few days ago). “I was happy” alone contains too little information and is content that even AI can output sufficiently. You need to be able to verbalize your situation more deeply.

Verbalization should also be useful in work. When providing context to AI, you must include content that would be ignored as obvious when dealing with humans. Even taking a single word, if you don’t clarify its definition and expected value, it will be misunderstood. This is the same when dealing with humans too. The era of getting by with vague instructions like “do this and that nicely” is over, and higher verbalization ability is now required (even for engineers).

Recording

Another important thing is recording. Memories fade in an instant. Take notes immediately of the emotions you feel right now. The painful emotions you feel today will dissipate by tomorrow. It’s the so-called “out of sight, out of mind” state. When this happens, you won’t be able to correctly output your experiences.

Therefore, it’s important to take notes while the memory is fresh. If you just keep it in your brain, it will fade in an instant, but if you jot down a small note somewhere, when you look back later, the memory will be reproduced. You don’t need to record everything—there’s no problem as long as you leave just one phrase that can trigger the memory.

Delivery

Long ago, when I started as a PM, I thought “if I just write rigorous documentation, the system will be implemented correctly.” However, what actually gets produced is very hard-to-read, stiff text. No one wants to read such text, and eyes will glaze over it. As a result, requirements get missed. There’s no point in insisting “it’s in the documentation.” Unread text has no value.

The same goes for presentations and such. No matter how good the content is, if the delivery is poor, it’s meaningless. Conversely, no matter how clumsy the slides are, if they’re getting through to the audience, there’s no problem at all.

In other words, the issue is delivery. In the context of communication, it might be called storytelling. Simply conveying facts in a monotone won’t move people’s hearts. By sharing emotions and speaking from your experience, it can become text that resonates with others.

Sharing Experience Connects to Your Career

Going forward, development using AI will increasingly grow. When that happens, what will become of individual careers? Even if you work on large-scale system development, if what you were doing was left to AI, where is your own value?

Output should be useful for solidifying your career as well. And what’s important there is the experience of what you thought, what you struggled with, and how you overcame it. Outputting that experience will lead to differentiation from others.

Tips: Don’t Use AI, Not Even Copilot

Personally, when writing blog posts, I try not to use excellent AI suggestions like GitHub Copilot. It’s because I feel like my thoughts are being gradually guided when suggestions pre-empt what I was going to write and I keep approving them.

The content I want to output from within myself belongs to me alone. If AI intervenes and changes it to something they(?) want, it might no longer be what I originally wanted to say. Above all, if there are ways of writing that I would absolutely never use (bold text, horizontal lines, sentences ending with colons, etc.), it’s no longer my own writing.

Text that doesn’t rely on AI may have hard-to-read parts or typos and misspellings. I’ve accepted that as it is—it’s what you might call a uniquely human flavor.

Conclusion

With the AI era upon us, I feel the importance of output is actually increasing. This means the gap between those who output and those who don’t is widening. Precisely because we’re in an era where AI can handle anything, doesn’t the value of those who produce output emerge?

However, output that’s like an inferior version of AI is meaningless. Only output that includes experience and emotion, which only humans can create, will have value.