All of my skills have been overtaken by AI. Now what?

I thought I was immune to the AI takeover.

I was a copywriter for most of my working years — and a mediocre blog writer for much longer. I’m an artist, partial to pencils, oils, acrylic, watercolour, and the iPad. I’m a designer who’s built small brands for friends and family. And I’m a strategist, which means I solve knotty problems for a living.

In an industry of specialists, I wanted to be a generalist. A creative Swiss army knife.

But then in 2022, the entire world gained the ability to write, literally overnight. Suddenly, people were littering their paragraphs with triplets and em dashes. (Which I now must refrain from overusing lest my work be dismissed as AI drivel.)

Soon after conquering writing, AI annexed my second skill set: art. And that escalated at a ridiculous pace. It was like watching a toddler learn to stand, only to sprint out the door minutes later.

Once it had dominated words and art, its next logical invasion was design, making it possible for anyone to create logos and posters from a single, lacklustre prompt.

But the nail in my coffin was AI’s advance into strategic and creative thinking. I naïvely thought the originality and insight of the human mind could never be replaced by a machine. And yet, ****every new model reminds me that our nerves and neurons are no match for silicon and sand.

So, now what?

The skills I’d honed over the years had been democratised. Anyone with a fully developed frontal lobe and a ChatGPT subscription could do what I do. My colleagues assured me my job would never be replaced by a bartending Tesla Bot, but I remained unconvinced.

Then one day, during a presentation, someone in the room pointed at the screen.

“That is such a Jasmine slide,” he said.

I stared at it, wondering what he meant. It wasn’t a particularly impressive slide, but it was, indeed, the sort of slide I’d make.

That’s when I realised: there’s a particular way I construct my thoughts — a way of framing, explaining, and visualising ideas that is undeniably me.

I had a style. And it didn’t matter whether it was good. All that mattered was that I had one. And people had noticed.

With the rise of AI in creative and strategic work, we don’t talk about style nearly enough. I’ve read articles about the importance of taste — the ability to sort out good responses from the bad. But style is something else entirely.

Style allows people to pinpoint who exactly wrote, designed, sang, played, illustrated, coded, engineered, or orchestrated something. Style sets you apart from other people using the same AI toolkit.

Style sets you apart, period.

Developing a style isn’t easy, nor is there a magical formula. All I know is that it takes effort. It’s pushing pixels until your eyes dry out, it’s carefully choosing the words to build your argument, it’s observing how your thoughts frolic during deep research.

Style comes from your personality, culture, history, experiences, likes, dislikes, and perspective on the world. It comes from finding your voice and seeding bits of yourself into a sentence, a speech, a design. (Kind of like a Horcrux, actually — without the murders.)

However you cultivate your style, creatives and thinkers today need to find theirs, fast. And they won’t find it in their favourite AI platform.

Because the problem is, generative AI can only make flawless work. But what makes you valuable today isn’t how perfect your work is, it’s how easily your work can be attributed to you.

To do this, people need to step away from the very thing that makes their creations so impeccable.

Style, by contrast, is fundamentally flawed — because it’s human by nature. Yet people have become so anxious about making mistakes that they’d rather deliver generic, polished work than make it their own.

When the world is writing, creating, and thinking with AI, it becomes very evident when someone isn’t. And there’s value in that if you do it right.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use AI. But it should only finish what you’ve started. Your work needs to stay true to who you are — to your wildly imperfect voice. Because when you have a way of doing something nobody else can replicate, it becomes your advantage. Since there is no single ‘right’ way to solve problems or create art, all you can rely on is your version of doing it.

So yes, every single one of my skills has been taken over by AI. People can now write, design, and think better than I do.

But I believe not everyone can write, design, and think the way I do.

And maybe… that’s more important.

This article was written, edited and illustrated by humans only.