When it comes to writing, AI changes everything. And AI changes nothing.

AI has significantly influenced the types of clients I have now. But the fundamentals of what I help people with — clear, accurate, engaging communication — remain exactly the same.

How AI has changed my projects

These are the projects I’m working on right now and how AI has changed them.

Writing workshop

I’m conducting a corporate workshop to help workers at a media company communicate better in writing.

What’s the same: The objectives of their writing are the same, and the principles they should follow — clarity, brevity, putting the most important information up front, following a narrative — are unchanged.

What AI changes: The workers use AI now, so the workshop includes how to effectively use AI as a writing tool.

Ghostwriting

I’m ghostwriting a book of principles for startup founders for a client who is an expert in startups.

What’s the same: The project requires extensive research, discovery interviews with the client, case study interviews, and shuttling drafts back and forth.

What AI changes: The research is far more efficient with AI. AI creates transcripts of the interviews. We’ll also use it to review the final text for inconsistencies and other issues.

Editing

I’m editing a business book on AI.

What’s the same: As with all books about technology, it’s important to write the book at a strategic or conceptual level, because specific technical details are in flux. The other problems an editor addresses — quality of ideas, structure, language, and flow — are unchanged.

What AI changes: AI is evolving so quickly that the focus on a strategic perspective is even more important. I also use AI to review facts for accuracy. At a later stage, I may use it to review the text for inconsistencies and errors that I missed.

Coaching

I’m coaching an author writing a memoir about her leadership experience.

What’s the same: The qualities that make a memoir with lessons compelling are unchanged — it has to connect emotionally and make non-obvious points about the world. It also has to have a defined audience, a strong central idea, and a logical, easy-to-follow organization.

What AI changes: Both my connection with the client and the client’s connection with the reader are a combination of logic and emotion that AI isn’t very helpful with. At some point, though, I’ll create a bot that has access to all my advice on writing and can answer clients’ questions so we can spend our time on the hard stuff.

Survey analysis and report

I’ve just completed and written a report about how writers use AI.

What’s the same: The process of designing a survey, fielding it, and analyzing the results hasn’t changed. (I tried using AI to analyze some of the data and found the results weren’t dependable.) Similarly, the process of writing the report was no different from what it was before AI.

What AI changes: I used AI to check some of the lists of items in the survey. I also used it sort through thousands of verbatim comments to find those that were most interesting.

AI has changed the gigs I get, but not the way I approach them

Looking at this list, a few things strike me.

First, nobody is using AI to do what I used to do. AI is a poor workshop teacher, writer, developmental editor, coach, and survey designer, and an uninspired report writer.

Second, mastery of AI concepts is now an element of my qualifications. The ghostwriting client would never have chosen me if I wasn’t competent with AI, and neither would the editing client. The workshop gig exists because corporate writers want to know how to integrate AI into their work.

Third, I use AI as a tool. There is no point in doing rote work that AI can do more efficiently. I want to concentrate on what I’m good at, not what a machine is good at.

But most importantly, the objectives and principles have not changed. Clear writing is still clear writing, and is still important. Teaching requires judgment, experience, flexibility, and responsiveness. Collaboration, editing, and coaching require a sensitivity to my human connection to the author and an expert knowledge of language, narrative, and publishing. Insightful surveys and reports require clever design and attention to detail and data storytelling skills.

Writing still does the same job: connecting a writer’s ideas to a reader’s mind in an inspirational way.

There is a lesson here for excellent freelancers of all kinds. If you are uniquely skilled at what you do, people will still need you to do it. But you’d better learn to use AI if you want to stay relevant and efficient.

AI is a great tool. But so far, at least for me, that’s all it is.

I can’t see a future where AI changes the relationship between writer and reader, but of course, I could just be shortsighted about that. What do you think?