In an era of rapid artificial intelligence (AI) development, content creation faces unprecedented challenges. Nicholas Cole, who has earned over $30 million from writing, argues that templated content generated by AI is being devalued and losing its competitiveness. The key to success lies in building a "digital brain"—a repository of personal stories, opinions, and unique ideas—which not only attracts clients but also serves as a robust foundation for AI's work, transforming it from a generator of "AI slop" into a powerful tool for creating valuable and authentic material.

Introduction and Personal Brand

Nicholas Cole has earned over $30 million writing online. His experience in content creation is highly valuable. This material is a comprehensive guide to content creation in the age of AI. It explains why much author content is ignored in the face of AI, why AI devalues templated writing, and how to build a "digital brain"—a repository of personal stories, opinions, and ideas that attracts clients 24/7, builds trust, and gives AI a real foundation to work with.

For those who write online, sell online, or want to accumulate ideas, this material is worth thousands of dollars, but it's free. Success in AI content creation will go to those who use AI to create truly interesting material, not just generate "AI slop."

By the end of this material, listeners will be able to better assess the short-term, mid-term, and long-term value of any content they create, publish, or promote online, even before they create it. The goal is to understand the root causes of your actions before you invest your time.

With so many opportunities to build apps and launch SaaS products, customer acquisition remains a challenge. Writing, as Nicholas Cole demonstrates, is an effective tool for capturing attention and creating viral content. This material aims to reveal the secrets of creating content that will accompany the products you build, tell stories, and resonate with your audience.

In the age of AI, there is a trend toward content devaluation.

Loss of Competitive Advantage in SaaS

A competitive advantage in SaaS is lost if the product is merely a collection of features for completing tasks. Such a product is a commodity. SaaS with a strong point of view creates a competitive advantage. This means the product or platform allows users to complete tasks in a specific way, following a particular methodology.

For example, the TypeShare platform is not designed simply as another scheduler or editor. Its purpose is to simplify tasks for users who want to apply a specific methodology for writing online. This point of view defines the product and creates a competitive advantage for it.

Building a Personal Brand and Content

There are different types of content: product content, personality-driven content, and original content. Each of these content types creates a different level of influence within your personal language model.

If you imagine building a SaaS platform that tries to completely copy an existing product, then when developing each new feature, you will constantly have to refer back to the original source for clarification. This means you will always be behind, as you will only be copying others' ideas and methodologies.

The absence of a competitive advantage in SaaS or any other field arises from the lack of one's own point of view. Conversely, having a unique point of view creates a significant competitive advantage in SaaS, product management, copywriting, and marketing.

Language, including the English alphabet, is open-source for communication. No one owns individual letters of the alphabet or most words. For example, no one owns the word "tomato" or "catastrophe." Even names are not unique; there are many people named Greg or Cole. If someone says, "My name is Cole," and you write, "My name is Greg," it is not plagiarism.

Most words, their combinations, thoughts, and ideas are common and cannot be attributed to a single person. This is what causes the feeling that text is written by artificial intelligence when a reader identifies the absence of a unique point of view.

The Difference Between Commodity and Personal Content

Content created with artificial intelligence (AI) is often "commodity" content. This means it is not tied to a specific author and feels generic, like reading general advice on healthy living, such as "the key to weight loss is healthy eating." Such statements are "commodity propositions" because they have been repeated countless times by many people.

In the age of AI, where the creation of unlimited text content has become accessible to anyone at any speed and volume, the question of content value arises. The simplest distinction between commodity and personal content lies in the author's perspective. Content written from a "you should" stance leans towards "commodity" as it reiterates common knowledge. In contrast, content based on the author's personal experiences and thoughts ("I think," "I did this") is "personal content." Consumers of such content perceive the author's personal opinion rather than generalized statements on a topic.

Not all content is created equal. Some material can go viral even if it is a rehash of Wikipedia information or generalized AI-generated ideas. However, it is important to determine the purpose of content creation. When creating content, two aspects should be considered: providing maximum value to the consumer and creating "affinity."

Providing value means constantly thinking about how to help the reader. This approach avoids the "you should" instructional tone, which can come across as condescending. Creating "affinity" happens when content benefits the reader by offering new ideas or different perspectives. For example, the concept of "English as an open-source language" might be associated with the author who first introduced the idea.

The value of a new idea delivered to an audience, especially in a business context, can lead to increased profits, improved productivity, career advancement, and other positive outcomes for the consumer. It is this aspect—the delivery of unique value and experience—that is key to creating meaningful content.

Value and Personal Experience

The value of content is always relative and depends on the audience's level. What seems valuable to an experienced entrepreneur might be useless to a beginner who has not yet reached the appropriate level of understanding. Similarly, basic knowledge that seems obvious to an experienced person can be extremely useful for a novice.

The author, with 15 years of experience writing online and over a decade of experience in online writing, having produced over 50 million words, is experiencing frustration. This frustration stems from the fact that, despite the capabilities of AI in content creation, he continues to spend time re-explaining basic ideas to beginners. These ideas, such as choosing a niche or defining uniqueness, are simple for him but new to beginners. Repeating these topics, in his opinion, is an inefficient use of limited time.

This experience has led to the realization that "commodity content" (basic, widely available content) has value, especially for newcomers to any industry. However, as more and more such content is created on a particular topic, the author begins to feel repetition and a lack of new ideas, which reduces efficiency.

When creating a content library, it is important to analyze the reasons for writing each piece and assess its added value to one's personal "digital model" or "personal language model." The author has a decade of experience as a ghostwriter.

Content Creation Methods

Previously, a workflow was used with clients who were very busy. These could be clients who wrote a book, hosted a podcast, or recorded internal meetings. From these materials, whether a book, blog posts, or spoken words, words and phrases were extracted to create new content. This process is analogous to the work of a ghostwriter.

The main misconception is that a ghostwriter does not create fundamentally new ideas or put new thoughts into the client's mouth. A ghostwriter actually uses the client's so-called "approved language." If the client uttered certain words, then one can take a sentence from the first chapter, a sentence from the second, two sentences from the third, and two from the fourth, and then assemble them into new text. All these words and their combinations were spoken by the client.

Thus, a manual version of what artificial intelligence (AI) can and should do in the future was implemented. The larger the content library, the more ideas and approved language are available, allowing for new combinations to be created. This fundamental idea, related to crystallizing thought and building an online content library, is not realized by most. AI does not write content in the literal sense; it creates new combinations from approved language derived from previously written materials.

The advantage of this approach is the ability to continue helping beginners by passing on necessary ideas without spending limited time repeatedly saying the same thing. This frees up time for thinking about new concepts. This is the utopian hope for AI: automating low-value tasks, freeing up time for more meaningful activities.

In the context of writing, this means AI will help repeat standard, already extensively articulated ideas, freeing up time to develop atypical, personal, or original ideas. This increases the long-term value of a person's "digital brain." Society will benefit from more people engaging in the development of new ideas rather than simply generating blog posts that repeat existing thoughts.

This creates two bottlenecks. The first is how to create a "second brain" that people can use, for example, with Obsidian.

Using Technology to Create Content

There are two main obstacles to creating content using technology. The first is properly collecting ideas using "second brain" software so they are stored safely. The second obstacle is how to use these ideas, which can be either high-quality or low-quality, with large language models (LLMs) to avoid creating low-quality content ("slop").

Some people are adept at using LLMs by applying proper prompting techniques or using agents to get eloquent results. This is no different than working with ghostwriters, where subjectivity is inherent in the process, as human writers have different styles. LLMs can also exhibit subjectivity.

The main mistake is trying to skip the writing stage. People assume their LLM is knowledgeable enough to perform this task on its own. However, this results in a significant loss of leverage. Instead of letting bots write for you, you should use them to reproduce your own content.

For example, if you publish content on various social platforms and have a large library of short texts (e.g., 10,000 tweets), you can use technology to republish this content across different platforms. Instead of manually selecting the most effective posts from your library to republish, which is a low-leverage process, you can use social media managers, virtual assistants (VAs), or, currently, AI and agents.

The long-term value of creating a "digital brain" or a personal language model is that AI can easily understand and process your content. For example, if you created a short post about the five benefits of journaling and another post about the seven benefits of journaling, AI can combine the information from both posts to create a new list.

When creating content, it is important to ask yourself about the short-term, mid-term, and long-term value of the material you are creating. The value of creating "commodity content" lies in its virtually endless supply.

The Problem of Low-Quality Content

In the realm of personal finance, there are instances of "commodified" content. These include claims that one must give up their morning coffee to build wealth, as it saves $3, or the advice to invest in the S&P 500 for 30 years to become a millionaire. Another example is the assertion that foregoing a mortgage in favor of renting can be more beneficial in the long run.

These ideas are "commodified" because they are not unique to any specific individual. They represent general viewpoints on financial strategies. The problem arises when content creators expect artificial intelligence (AI) to independently determine which of these viewpoints they agree with.

For instance, if the topic is personal finance, AI might generate text recommending saving on coffee and investing in the S&P 500. A user might deem this content "slop," unaware that the AI chose this example because it doesn't know the user's personal preferences.

The long-term value of a content library lies in the author's clarity about which viewpoints they endorse and which they do not. The uniqueness is not in the ideas themselves but in their connection to the author's personal identity. The more these connections crystallize, the more advantage the author gains when working with AI, as the AI will avoid examples that do not align with the author's views.

To implement this approach, the AI needs access to the author's content library. This bypasses the author's need to self-reflect on their beliefs.

People's Desire to "Skip" the Process

People strive to avoid the thinking stage, relying on robots to do it for them. This desire for the shortest path is actually a longer road in disguise.

An example of this can be seen in the author's experience on the Quora platform in 2013-2014. The author wrote several answers about their experience as a professional World of Warcraft player in their teenage years. In each answer, this experience was mentioned differently. For instance, phrases like: "When I was a teenager, I was a highly competitive World of Warcraft player" or "I was one of the highest-ranked World of Warcraft players in North America at 17" were used.

One of these answers went viral. The author speculated that it was the first sentence and how it was phrased that resonated with the audience. Over the next five to ten years, the author used this same phrase or variations of it hundreds of times in their publications.

The goal of using artificial intelligence (AI) is to help authors leverage already formulated ideas, word groups, viewpoints, and perspectives. When an author has well-articulated a thought once or twice, AI can take over the further repetition. AI should handle repetition, not the creation of fundamentally new content that requires thought and original phrasing.

Association and Personal Branding

When content does not reflect the author's personality, it is perceived as inauthentic. This association can harm the brand, as the audience connects it with a source that does not provide real value. Stealing the listener's or reader's time is considered unacceptable. Low-quality content elicits a negative reaction, as consumers perceive it as "sloppy" and undesirable.

In the age of artificial intelligence, the question of content ownership arises, if language is an open resource. No one owns the alphabet or the vast majority of words. Most people also do not own most word combinations. If language is open, then what is ownership? There is a legal aspect of ownership, such as the ability to register trademarks for names. However, in a general sense, ownership is just another term.

The Importance of Association for Recognition

Association occurs when certain ideas or topics become linked to specific individuals. The simplest way to achieve this association is by frequently creating content around a particular topic. For instance, if an individual creates more content about AI startup ideas than the vast majority of others, people will begin to associate those ideas with them.

Another example of association can be seen with Ramit Sethi and his approach to personal finance. He often says, "Keep drinking your $6 coffee, live your rich life." This thesis goes against the common wisdom of saving and investing in the S&P 500. On the other end of the spectrum is Dave Ramsey, who advocates for saving, investing, and getting out of debt.

The format associated with Dave Ramsey is his live call-in shows where he asks listeners about their spending and debt, often eliciting humorous responses. This demonstrates that the format or structure of content can also create association. Essentially, owning a topic is a form of association.

Content Volume and Its Impact on Perception

A large volume of content dedicated to a specific topic helps form an association between the author and that topic. The next level of association involves the author's personality. The audience should know not only what the author writes about a topic but also specific details about them.

Consider the example of two personal finance experts. The first expert writes extensively about personal finance, but the audience knows nothing about them personally. The second expert, perhaps equally or less qualified, shares information about their personal life, personality, and worldview. For instance, this expert is a single mother who divorced three years ago and is raising two children. She worked hard to provide for their education and started a blog that became successful. The audience knows these details about her.

Personality and Experience as the Foundation of Content

Content with a strong personality often surpasses standardized content in reach and popularity, even if the latter is more authoritative. An example of this can be seen with financial bloggers who have a distinct personality, attracting a larger audience than figures like Ray Dalio, despite his multi-billionaire status. While the author's authority and experience are important for trust and learning, they are not the sole determinants of success. The author's personality and their willingness to share their experiences, creating associations between them and the topic being discussed, become a key element. The more personal details and experiences an author connects to a topic, the more strongly their content resonates with the audience.

The Liberating Power of a Unique Approach

A unique approach can be liberating for many people, especially for those who are product creators, beginners, or experienced founders looking to build an organic audience. It is not necessary to generate groundbreaking or radically new ideas. It is enough to present yourself as a startup founder and reveal your unique traits, worldview, place of residence, number of siblings, educational institution, major, and hobbies. In an era of abundant standardized text content, these details become distinguishing features.

Every time you write about personal experiences or details of your personality, they should be integrated into your "digital brain" or personal language model. For example, if at 17 you were one of the top World of Warcraft players in North America, this becomes a significant detail that can be repeated to enhance recognition.

Association as a Key Element

Association is formed by matching life details, events, and worldview with a specific personality. Gary Vaynerchuk has been repeating his desire to acquire the New York Jets for 15 years. This is a detail of his personality that millions of people associate him with. Despite the fact that Vaynerchuk is not primarily a sports figure, and he made his fortune in the wine and marketing agency sectors, he has become associated with the New York Jets.

Competitors will create standardized content using common ideas. In contrast, auditing personal unique details, views, and perspectives, stored in a file or specialized software, will allow content to stand out. Using the same tools and methodologies for mass content production leads to its standardization.

Personal stories and unique details act as "dynamite" in the content creation process, allowing it to stand out. Using the same large language models (LLMs) leads to the creation of content from the same dataset. A personal content library, based on individuality, represents an untapped dataset.

Limitations of AI in Content Creation

Artificial intelligence is incapable of creating content based on personal experience that has not yet been articulated and does not exist in data form. This includes childhood memories, lessons learned, mistakes made, and other formative events. To create such content, one must dedicate time to building an "uncreated dataset" by describing their own life journey.

Articulating personal experiences, especially mistakes, in the form of stories instantly distinguishes such content from material covering the same basic idea. Therefore, the primary focus should be on generating new, value-adding data about one's own development.

The assertion of having an uninteresting life or lacking unique traits is a misconception. Even the most mundane experiences can resonate with others, allowing them to see themselves in these narratives. For instance, moving across the country twice in four years, while not a unique event, represents an experience that can resonate with others who have had similar journeys. People share such stories daily in casual conversation, fostering connection and understanding. This concept was relevant as far back as 2016-2017 when working with clients on copywriting.

Real Life and a Unique Perspective

Humans are inherently "walking, talking language models." When meeting someone, for instance, over coffee, a person shares information from their personal experiences: where they are from, how many siblings they have, when they moved to the city, and what their interests are. If the other person shares the same interests, this forms the basis for conversation. This process is a scalable version of sharing personal information.

Publishing texts online allows one to avoid repeatedly sharing the same life facts, stories, and viewpoints at various meetings, dinners, or picnics. Instead of manually reproducing this information, one can write about it once and publish it online. This enables sharing the same personal experiences as in a face-to-face meeting, but in a scalable format.

The Value of a Unique Perspective and Experience

A unique perspective, insight, or life fact, presented in the form of a story, can be disseminated to an unlimited number of people. Artificial intelligence (AI) can integrate this content into your library. After that, you may decide not to tell this story anymore if it has already been told or written in various iterations. AI can reproduce it at your request.

The Fundamental Advantage of AI-Assisted Writing

Over the next decade, the fundamental advantage in writing will lie in the use of artificial intelligence (AI). This approach is applicable to building a personal brand. If you aim to create a personal brand and make a name for yourself, similar to Gary Vee, then leveraging AI becomes a key factor.

The Problem with Branded Content

Branded content always loses to personal branding because consumers prefer to get information from specific people rather than corporate accounts. This observation has been true for a long time; even early in the author's career, it was clear that no one wanted to hear from a branded Twitter page and preferred to address the CEO or other company representatives. This trend toward strengthening personal branding continues to accelerate.

However, there's no reason why branded content can't duplicate the public ideas that a personal brand promotes. For example, the X and LinkedIn accounts of the SaaS platform TypeShare can publish the same "five benefits of online writing" as the author. However, personal details, such as achieving a high rank in World of Warcraft at age 17, are irrelevant to the brand and should not be broadcast through its channels.

The author believes that personal brand and branded content can work synergistically. The personal brand forms the "language model" of the individual, and branded content can leverage this model by ignoring personal details and focusing on public ideas. This allows brands to choose which viewpoints they want to broadcast while maintaining a human-centric approach.

An example of this approach can be seen with the brand Taco Bell, which, despite its standardized product, can create content based on employee stories, such as that of Tiffany from an Oklahoma store who has been visiting Taco Bell since she was 13, and whose parents met at the establishment. This approach opens doors for creating personality-driven content that often outperforms more "authentic" public content.

If a brand creates exclusively public content without a personal component, it creates the least effective and least valuable form of content. A small amount of creativity allows for a transition to creating content with personal elements. The ultimate goal is the crystallization of thought through prolonged writing on a specific topic, leading to the creation of original content.

The author emphasizes that the mere act of writing something does not imply ownership or originality. Phrases like "I woke up today and made coffee" are public and belong to no one. The mistaken belief that writing automatically grants originality and ownership is incorrect. Original thinking arises from the prolonged crystallization of one's worldview within a specific subject.

An example of original thinking is Pythagoras's six words stating that the Earth is round, not flat. Such ideas come after many years of deep contemplation on a subject. The desire to write "about everything" prevents one from delving deeply into a topic and saying something original, reducing the activity to a repetition of public ideas.

In the context of comparing writing and short-form video, the author argues that both formats work. His own business, generating multi-million dollar revenue, is primarily based on written content, while short-form videos are created by clipping longer recordings. Short-form videos, like other formats, often require a script, which is essentially written content.

The value of content is determined by its position on the spectrum between timely (high short-term value, low long-term) and timeless (low short-term value, high long-term). For instance, a meme about a foldable desktop computer has high short-term value but quickly becomes outdated. Conversely, an essay on AI that the author spent two weeks on will remain relevant for years.

When creating content, it's important to align expectations with its nature. One cannot expect the same short-term distribution for timeless content as for a meme relevant for 24 hours. Adding elements like "just released" or specifying the year, such as "Substack launched a new feature. I'm running a paid newsletter with $400,000 annual revenue, here's how to start a Substack in 2026," fundamentally changes its value and shelf life.

Every piece of content created adds something to the author's "digital brain," their knowledge of the world, and their personal language model. The value of this addition is exponentially higher when a new essay with a unique perspective is created, compared to repeating already known ideas. AI can be an effective tool for repetition and remixing content, but a human must guide the process, defining the worldview, ideas, and personal details.

Voice (style) in writing is not an intangible quality but a collection of elements such as word choice, sentence length, and structure. For example, using the word "cool" creates one impression, "exquisite" another, and "damn cool" a third. Sentence length and structure also shape the perception of the author. Voice is something that is intentionally created, not something that happens spontaneously.

The author's experience writing for clients shows that even small changes, such as adding links to authoritative sources, can drastically alter a client's perception of the text, making it sound "like them." Often, people who say they dislike their own voice are actually afraid to write at all. Most writing consists of 80% public phrases and 20% subjective word choices, such as adjectives.

Discovering the desired qualities of one's voice is only possible through the practice of writing. It's impossible to know which adjectives or sentence rhythms are preferred without trying them. Without this, it's impossible to teach AI to replicate these nuances.

Many people underestimate the volume of content they can produce. It is recommended to publish a minimum of five pieces of content per day, utilizing appropriate systems and potentially AI for this purpose. This is necessary to give content a chance to succeed.

Large companies recognize the need for a media component and invest in content creation. The author suggests that the best marketing investment for Fortune 500 companies would be to hire thoughtful journalists and non-fiction writers to create deep content about the industry. This approach builds a content library that fuels the entire marketing infrastructure and can be repurposed into various formats.

A "brain company" is a competitive advantage because it continuously grows and enriches itself. Using AI to process and distribute content from this "library" allows for its scaling. Companies spend millions of dollars acquiring data, and content language libraries are an equally valuable asset.

Success in leveraging acquired data or content depends on having the operational infrastructure to scale it and extract maximum benefit. One intelligent individual working on building the company's "digital brain" can supply the entire marketing engine with content, which can then be repurposed and distributed. This is a vision of the future where a "company brain as a service" could become the foundation for a new business.