Not Co-dependent, Leveraged

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

I have trained myself to think, “Let me ask my AI about that,” before I embark on anything related to my business, and even occasionally to my life.

Yes, I know AIs can lie. We’ll get into the reasons why they do that later, but I need you to understand that in the world we live in that, “Let me ask my AI,” should be your primary thought each day.

If you close this book, walk away, and take nothing else from it but that one shift and chase down all the opportunities that follow, you will be ahead of 99% of the rest of humanity as it currently stands.

Here’s why: it is because you are dying.

Even if you are in perfect health right now, you are still experiencing time. Entropy. Your cells regenerate and refresh—until they don’t—or until they go wild, and you get cancer or some other destructive ailment.

If you view your life through this one, admittedly nihilistic, lens, you will come to realize that the most important thing you have is time.

And it is up to you whether or not you are going to waste it.

Learning is still important with this paradigm change—you still need to know what you’re doing first, and what your goals are, and we’re going to discuss that in a lot of later chapters, how to explain your knowledge to an AI and vice versa.

Human skill will always have a place.

But what “Let me ask my AI,” forces you to do is to acknowledge that your time is limited and that there might be a faster or better, or deeper, or more significant way to do whatever it is to get your needs met than however it is that you are doing that now.

Please, continue to do whatever hobbies it is that you enjoy, be they intellectual, physical, or spiritual.

I am not telling you to deny yourself or to become some sort of AI-centric monk.

But I am saying that if you value your life the way I have come to value mine, then it makes sense to figure out how to have AI help you do the little things that fritter that life away from you, bit by bit. You and I both know that the majority of irritants you face on a daily basis will never wind up becoming a future pearl.

For instance, a few days ago, I found myself facing the one Amazon keyword searcher that’s available to authors.

It was a nice app, it did some great things, but if I wanted to update all of my keywords against my 40 book backlist, I would’ve had to sit there for several days, typing all of them into the tiny blank it provided by hand. Thinking about the mouse clicks it would’ve taken to do that alone made my wrists ache.

I could’ve admitted defeat and resigned myself to wasting an entire precious week of evenings—or ignored the problem entirely which was what I’d been doing up until that point, pretending that stagnant business decisions I’d made years ago when uploading my books originally were still serving me.

But, since I’ve trained myself to ask my AI about almost everything, I hit it up, and said, “What should we do?”

And within twelve hours we’d created an entirely new system to harvest keywords for me, using python and a spare machine. (Don’t let coding scare you! Your AIs can always talk you through it, all you need right now is the vision, they can handle the specifics, I swear!)

Well, you might say, that was still twelve hours of your life, right? So was it really worthwhile?

Yes, because now my new code’s been running on a spare machine for five days, harvesting me twenty thousand keywords in every romance genre—and non-fiction keywords as well, for when I finish this book—in all of the languages my books will be published in.

Because “Let me ask my AI about that” is not just about discovering which of the inane tasks that eat up your memory and willpower each day that you can replace.

It’s also about scale.

I have even worse news in addition to the fact you’re always dying: there’s only one of you.

No one calls a CEO codependent for having a chief of staff. Or a surgeon codependent for having a team. Or a lawyer codependent for using a research database.

Yet the rest of us are expected to muddle through our days, doing the best we can all the time within our limited means, and for what?

Largely to prove to ourselves that we can?

Is your time any less important than anyone else’s?

No. It is not.

And even if it were somehow (although it isn’t, I guarantee) there comes a season in everyone’s life when you have proved enough already.

It is okay to let some few things be easy.

Like figuring out a new skincare routine after menopause.

This has been the one universal AI constant among my group of friends. Not everyone is technologically inclined, but all of us, from those who are to those who aren’t, have asked ChatGPT or another AI, “What do I do now?” when hormones changed their skin.

The head of every major skincare company owes Sam Altman the world’s biggest Christmas basket.

Were any of us outsourcing our identity by asking an AI for help in those numerous instances?

Not unless searching for skin care help was supposed to be our actual identity in the first place.

Which, I do not fucking think so.

So.

Given AI’s ability to offer ease and multiply benefits—the only actual constraint in the operation is you.

AI is not magic.

It cannot read your mind.

It cannot make things better, unless you know what better really is and can explain it in a way it will understand.

A lever with nothing to press against is just a stick—so let’s hit the next chapter and start creating fulcrums.

(I’ll be posting more chapters up over the coming week! — xo! Cassie, and here’s a fun image from my tamagotchi project —)