Why AI needs creatives more than creatives need AI
Description: When making things becomes free, telling good from garbage becomes the scarce asset.
Don't out-produce AI. Out-judge it.
AI turned everyone into a producer. It turned no one into an editor.
The publishing data makes the case. Imke Reimers at Cornell and Joel Waldfogel at Minnesota found that new e-book releases on Amazon went from roughly 100,000 a month before late 2022 to about 300,000 by the end of last year. Average quality fell, exactly as you would expect. But quality among the top thousand releases in each category actually rose. The flood didn't lower the ceiling. It buried it.
That's the opportunity. Producing got cheap. Finding the good one didn't.
Reimers, I., & Waldfogel, J. (2026). AI and the quantity and quality of creative products: Have LLMs boosted creation of valuable books? *NBER Working Paper No. 34777*.
Follow @danielpink for behavioral science you can put to work the same day you read it.--
To find out more about Daniel Pink, his books, and view his resources, visit https://danpink.com Close description
Don't out-produce AI. Out-judge it.
AI turned everyone into a producer. It turned no one into an editor.
The publishing data makes the case. Imke Reimers at Cornell and Joel Waldfogel at Minnesota found that new e-book releases on Amazon went from roughly 100,000 a month before late 2022 to about 300,000 by the end of last year. Average quality fell, exactly as you would expect. But quality among the top thousand releases in each category actually rose. The flood didn't lower the ceiling. It buried it.
That's the opportunity. Producing got cheap. Finding the good one didn't.
Reimers, I., & Waldfogel, J. (2026). AI and the quantity and quality of creative products: Have LLMs boosted creation of valuable books? *NBER Working Paper No. 34777*.
Follow @danielpink for behavioral science you can put to work the same day you read it.--
To find out more about Daniel Pink, his books, and view his resources, visit https://danpink.com Close description