Humans with skills; AI’s manifest destiny; robotic Melania: Newsletter 28 May 2025
Newsletter 96. Value at the intersection of humanity and excellence. Plus, ludicrous justifications for AI copyright theft, billionaire boosting big beautiful bill, three people to follow and three books to read.
The value of humans with skills
Career success comes from two qualities.
Skills.
And humanity.
Everyone knows that having skills — like writing ability or analytical capability — is helpful in your career. And you would think that being human is not something we’d need to work on: that it should come naturally.
But it is often harder to be human at work than it should be.
This is my experience. I went about my career the “wrong” way. The skills were fine, even excellent. But when I entered the workplace, nobody told me how to behave. So I just was my usual highly connected, smartass self. That’s not how to ingratiate yourself with managers, and I’m sure it limited my ability to become a manager myself, but there was no mistaking what you were getting with me. A guy with skills who was a little less inhibited and more transparently myself than I should have been.
It turns out that’s also a great way to be a freelancer. You need the skills to succeed, but you need the human interactions to keep the clients happy. You must communicate “I care about you” and “I really know what I’m doing” at the same time. That’s pretty important because a consultant’s job often consists of telling people what they did wrong and how to fix it.
Now that we are in a world where AI is cheap and accessible, this matters. Non-humans with skills are now easy to come by. In my recent interviews with writers, I’ve been surprised to see how many of them have embraced AI tools as sounding boards and conversational partners. Their AIs are nonhumans with terrific skills, and they’re quite happy to converse with them to advance their ideas.
But no one is happy with limiting themselves to nonhuman conversations, and no one wants to be fooled by a nonhuman conversational partner. We need human connections to succeed.
Humans without skills, of course, aren’t very helpful in the workplace. Friendly incompetents are annoying as teammates. But skills without humanity aren’t a very good substitute.
There is a moral here. If your success in the workplace is based primarily on skills, you’re in trouble. Whether that skill is coding, writing, data analysis, or decision-making, AI is getting better and better at it. You may be replaced; even if you aren’t, you’ll be competing with a machine.
But if you layer human qualities on top of those skills, you’re better off. That means human qualities like humor, empathy, judgment, leadership, charm, vulnerability, and perception. Layer that on top of a set of skills and you’re a lot harder to replace — and a lot easier to relate to. Whether you’re a doctor, a software engineer, a marketing copywriter, or an editor, that’s a combination that’s essential.
You must keep working on adding to those skills, because the knowledge of the world continues to progress, just as it always has. And of course, the ability to effectively use AI is now one of those skills you must master.
But you also need to keep working on your human-to-human qualities, because that’s what makes your others skills continue to be effective.
There are a lot of ways to do that. But don’t withdraw into a cocoon of machines and hide who you are — whether that’s a smartass like me or a quiet, sensitive, secretly brilliant and creative contributor. Because unless we can see your human qualities, you might as well be a machine, and machines are better at being machines than you are.
News for writers and others who think
Former Meta executive and UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg suggests that requiring licensing for AI training content would cripple the AI industry. Of course, that position ignores whether training on such content is legal. Given the importance of AI but the defensible legal position of copyright holders (as described, for example, in a recent report from the copyright office), I expect a mandatory licensing regime imposed on all public content, with some minimal compensation for copyright holders who register. That’s basically how music works now.
The audiobook of Melania Trump’s memoir has an AI narrator. Traditional voice talents considering doing the narration were apparently not robotic enough.
In Slate, Henry Grabar actually tracked down the guy who created the Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list with AI-generated fake books on it. He’s “a 56-year-old media lifer with two writing degrees trying to automate his own freelance job, using A.I. to maintain an impossible human workload of low-paid gigs.” When writing is so low-paid, AI slop appears to be an essential ingredient. Maybe we need less, better news — could we try that instead?
The witty and wordily-wise Elle Cordova has shared her take on the Big Beautiful Bill and more accurate names for it. This might be the most enjoyable 30 seconds of your day.
Three people to follow
Ed Zitron , contrarian technology critic
Angela Ackerman , dedicated to helping writers write
Anand Giridharadas , revealing who’s manipulating us and why
Three books to read
Sell to the Rich: The Insider’s Handbook to Selling Luxury by Jeffrey Shaw (2025). How to get money from people with money.
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos (Knopf, 2025). A love addict seeks the ecstasy of abstinence.
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker (Penguin, 2015). A guide to writing that’s clear without being dull.