2026 is the best push you’ll ever get as a creative to make work you’re actually in love with.
Why?
AI is eating everything. And I mean everything. It’s churning out blog posts, social media captions, email campaigns, video scripts, and probably grocery lists by now.
The internet is drowning in algorithmically generated mediocrity that all sounds exactly the same.
My boy Ben Settle put it perfectly over the years…
You don’t want to become a xerox copy of a fax of someone else.
But that’s exactly what’s happening. Every piece of AI generated content is just a remixed version of everything that came before it. It’s the creative equivalent of inbreeding, which by a stretch is technically functional, but missing something essential that makes it human.
Which means being uniquely, unapologetically, weirdly you has never been more valuable.
Your strange obsessions, your unpopular opinions, your specific way of seeing the world, that’s not just your creative voice anymore.
That’s the equivalent of you building an economic moat. It’s essentially what separates you from the tsunami of synthetic content flooding every platform.
The market is hitting a point where it’s about to be flooded with perfect, soulless work.
The people who survive won’t be the ones who can compete with AI on efficiency or polish. They’ll be the ones who create things so distinctly human, so genuinely personal, that no algorithm could ever replicate them.
What people forget is that it’s so damn easy. All you have to do is stop trying to sound like everyone else. Stop following templates. Stop playing it safe.
I mean personally I’d rather have the robots do safe.
Only you can do you.
And right now, before the AI wave fully crashes, you’ve got a window to plant your flag and say “this is what work looks like when it comes from an actual human being with actual thoughts and actual feelings.”
Don’t waste it trying to sound like everybody else.
Be irreplaceable. Be weird. Be you.
The machines are coming for everything except that and I’ll plant that flag every single day of the week until I die.
Even if it means I have to write about the same redundant things until you get it, that’ll be my calling.
Stephen Walker.