Angst and ai
Will there be enough people who need high-quality, verifiable analysis?
Temperatures are expected to hit 44 degrees Celsius this week, so this is a short one.
Let’s admit it right up front. I write for a living. I can spend ten minutes on a difficult, two-line WhatsApp message; half an hour on a two-paragraph email; and I often reorder a sentence about inflation just because I don’t like the rhythm, “the music”, of it.
This means that the most insulting thing that can appear on my screen is “Draft with Copilot”.
I have the privilege of being a total snob about artificial intelligence because I am writing in my native language, which also happens to be the current lingua franca of the world. I am a lucky so and so.
Maybe only “the gist” will end up being good enough?
Yet I should not be complacent. The cookie-cutter social media post, which I personally find soporific, might be perfectly adequate for those who don’t care so much about style.
Even “knowledgeable” ai articles that turn out to be based on made-up sources (given that hallucination is now being described as a feature, not a bug) might be all right for those who only need a general gist of the subject.
Where does that leave those of us whose unique selling point is reliably sourced analysis, on an extreme-niche subject, written (I hope) in an engaging manner?
The answer might already lie in the quality of subscribers of my monthly Sapienta Country Analysis Cyprus. Yes, I know this is shameless boast. But the subscribers really are the biggest countries, companies and institutions in the world. As it turns out, there just aren’t enough of them, to turn a phrase, for Fiona to live on blue-chip subscribers alone, because the market for “institutions interested in Cyprus” is tiny.
But it does tell me that top-level institutions will always need to be sure that they are getting not just reliable information but also valuable insights that are not made up by the latest ai bot.
Does that mean they will still need my 28, in-depth pages with facts and analysis that take two weeks to produce? Or will they want only 4 pages of insights, distilled from the same amount of time spent researching, verifying, thinking and musing, but then they will expect to pay less for it?
I have no idea. But the fear that this is the way things are heading is why I am trying out different potential revenue streams like Substack and other things.
It is also why I have just updated the Products and Services section on my company website to underline that, from me, “what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG)”. No make-up, no ai, no BS.
If you want my premium monthly in-depth product, check out Sapienta Country Analysis Cyprus and other deep-dive reports here. And if you can’t afford that but want the executive summary only for just €100/year*, you can find that here on Substack, at Cyprus Pocket Brief.
Or keep these articles and hugely labour-intensive videos coming by supporting this publication, Sapienta Cyprus Snippets, for just €49 per year.*
*Monthly payments are a massive administrative headache, so since I can’t switch them off I have effectively banned them by setting the monthly price the same as the annual.
AI writing is to the mind what the industrialization of food was for the stomach; from its mass production, mass availability to the fast food dimension. After years of eating that stuff people are desperate for the organic and the home made. I am actually thinking of labelling my brain’s produce AI-free.