How to become an irreplaceable artist in the age of AI
Production is no longer an advantage. Your mindset is.
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🏷️ Categories: Creativity, Mental models, Writing.
There’s a story I love, let me tell you about it.
Warren Buffett, one of the most important investors of recent decades, bought a textile company in the sixties: Berkshire Hathaway. Before it became the empire it is today, it was a fabric factory competing in an industry where every competitor was doing the same thing: investing in more efficient machinery to cut costs.
The problem is that every competitor was doing the same thing at the same time.
Every improvement one factory made was copied by the others within months, and the net result was that no one gained ground. Buffett learned that he’d been pouring capital into a race that led nowhere, because again and again, everyone ended up back at the same level.
In economics, this is known as the Jevons Paradox (Jevons, 1865).
In the 19th century, economist William Jevons observed something baffling: as steam engines became more efficient and consumed less coal, total coal consumption multiplied. Because it became more efficient, everyone started using it, saturating the system and demanding even more resources.
This concept explains something you feel in your body every day.
It’s the Jevons Paradox applied to your own effort. You work harder than ever and master more efficient tools, but you stay in the same place. You’re trapped in a system where efficiency now only lets you process more volume and keep the market from devouring you. When optimization is available to everyone, it stops being an advantage and becomes the minimum standard for survival.
And I want you to understand this before you keep reading: You can get out of that.
Competitive Inflation
Every new tool that hits the market promises to give you an edge.
And for a brief period, it does. SEO gave you an edge—until everyone learned SEO. Social media gave you an edge—until everyone learned to post content. Email marketing gave you an edge—until your inbox became a dumping ground for identical newsletters. Automation gave you an edge—until automating became the bare minimum needed to avoid being devoured.
This pattern repeats over and over, and if you don’t see it coming, it will drag you under.
Every new tool reduces the value of the previous one. Mass adoption of any advantage turns it into the new minimum standard. Yesterday it was an edge, today it’s the bare minimum to be anybody. And yes, you sense it correctly: artificial intelligence is the greatest productivity inflation ever created in human history.
I don’t say this as an apocalyptic warning—I’m not that kind of person.
I say it as an observation of the pattern I’ve just pointed out to you.
When a technology lets anyone, with no training or experience, produce in minutes what used to take years of practice, the value of that output collapses. That’s what’s happening right now, while you read this: thousands of people are generating content, code, and art in seconds.
Infinite Acceleration
Writing well used to be hard.
Designing well used to be hard.
Programming used to be hard.
That difficulty was a natural filter, a bottleneck that kept supply limited and, therefore, value high. If you knew how to code, you had a job. If you knew how to write clearly, you stood out from the crowd effortlessly. The scarcity of the skill was, in itself, the source of your competitive advantage.
Now anyone can do it. You can learn anything for free from home.
Not perfectly, maybe not with the same depth as a master of the craft or a university education, but well enough that the market stops rewarding you just for having that once-scarce knowledge. The bottleneck is no longer producing—it’s now thinking about how to focus that production.
Hold on to that key word: thinking.
Production Is No Longer an Advantage
Have you ever stopped to think about why gold is more expensive than water?
Water has immense potential for virtually every human activity. Gold doesn’t.
Water is abundant almost everywhere.
Gold isn’t.
Writing has stopped being scarce.
What’s scarce is your own judgment amid a sea of identical data.
What’s scarce is your vision in a volatile, contradictory world.
What’s scarce is your voice and unique style in an artificial, generic landscape—the style that makes you unforgettable and makes people stop scrolling and say “wow.”
What’s scarce is your capacity for synthesis, your ability to take data that seems contradictory at first glance and find the thread that connects it.
Renowned investor Naval Ravikant called this “specific knowledge” (2019): knowledge so tied to who you are, to your particular way of seeing the world, that it can’t be taught in a course or replicated by AI.
They can’t copy and paste the aura you radiate.
How to Escape the Jevons Paradox
By now you see that going fast only keeps you from falling behind.
Think about what this means for your life and work strategy. If your plan is just to produce more, increase your frequency, automate more tasks, and use more tools, you’ll have to accelerate even faster than everyone else just to keep your head a few inches above water. As Herbert Simon said decades ago: an abundance of information creates a scarcity of attention.
If you flood everything with information, no one will pay you genuine attention.
Just look at the current trend of short-form video to see it in action.
Could your audience truly connect with you in any depth if, while reading this article, they were also getting notifications for 10 new articles from you, 5 podcast episodes you appeared on, and 100 reels of yours still waiting to be watched?
Impossible. Attention is plummeting precisely because of this trend.
We need an alternative.
Get out of the race.
Getting Out of the Race
The advantage isn’t running faster.
It’s switching sports.
This is the paradigm that splits people into two distinct approaches, and one that, as the years pass, will separate them more and more. You can keep running faster and faster, adding more and more improvements just to survive the race.
Or you can run alone, in your own lane, by your own rules.
You’ll always be the best, because you removed every single possible competitor from the competition the moment you took your first step.
How does this apply in practice?
Instead of asking yourself “how do I produce faster?”, you start asking “what can I offer that no machine—and no person copying that machine—could ever offer?” What is that specific knowledge of yours that Naval Ravikant talked about?
You have it, but you have to dig deep into your passions to find it.
The Alchemist
Let’s call this figure the Alchemist, because that’s exactly what they do.
The Alchemist competes by transforming. They don’t give you information—they give you an original perspective on that information, one you can apply or use to your benefit. They don’t give answers; that’s what AI is for. The Alchemist gives you questions you hadn’t even thought to ask, leading you down paths you didn’t know existed. Their work consists of taking scattered, disconnected signals and combining them through their own unique lens until they create a vision no one else could have created, because no one else has that exact mix of experiences, obsessions, and contradictions that they do.
Here’s what that difference looks like in the real world:
In a productivity podcast:
The typical social-media version: A 45-minute episode repeating, for the hundredth time, the Pomodoro technique, waking up at 5:00 a.m., and using Notion to organize your life.
The Alchemist: Breaks down how 12th-century Benedictine monasteries designed the first time-management systems to avoid anxiety, then shows you how to apply that medieval structure to your Google calendar to work three hours less, using a simple routine they created themselves.
In an economics newsletter:
The typical social-media version: Yet another AI-written article titled “The 5 Most Profitable Investment Ideas to Make Your Money Work for You.”
The Alchemist: Connects a current crisis to the tulip fever of 1637 Holland and the psychology of crowds, explaining the psychological bias you should avoid if you want to save and invest wisely.
In a psychology book:
The typical social-media version: A 300-page self-help manual (that could’ve been a tweet) full of empty motivational phrases and ideas with no scientific grounding to explain why they’d work or why you should trust them.
The Alchemist: Cross-references neuroscience with Seneca’s Stoic philosophy to give you a clear, three-step protocol for making decisions under pressure and staying focused on your daily work.
In a cooking-and-history course:
The typical social-media version: A quick TikTok video set to trending music, teaching you an “easy, fast” pasta recipe.
The Alchemist: A journey through a single ingredient. They explain how the spice route shaped Europe’s geopolitical borders, then build a culinary guide inspired by a Michelin-starred chef for using spices at home.
The difference is night and day.
While ordinary creators compete in the Jevons race to produce more generic content that’s easy to make with AI, the Alchemist competes on depth, unexpected connections, and messages of real, pragmatic, novel value.
“In an age of speed, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing could be more luxurious than paying attention.”
— Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness
They can’t copy and paste the aura you radiate
Artificial intelligence can reproduce content en masse.
It can’t copy your lived experience. It can’t copy your obsessions. It can’t copy your contradictions. It can’t copy your sensibility. It can’t copy your wounds. It can’t copy what you’ve read. It can’t copy your personality.
Many people talk about finding your niche. You are the niche.
Project your unique view of the world onto every topic you’re passionate about.
We are entering in the economy of authenticity.
If everything is artificial, what’s human becomes scarce.
Look at what’s already happening around you:
Handwritten letters are a luxury gesture precisely because they’re slow and inefficient.
Craftsmanship keeps rising in value while mass production gets cheaper.
“Premium” cooking thrives right alongside ultra-processed fast food.
Concerts fill stadiums while streaming gives away music for free or nearly free.
See the pattern?
Kevin Kelly articulated this back in 2012 with his “1,000 True Fans” theory.
You don’t need millions of followers. You just need to connect with a thousand real people with whom you can build genuine connection—a real, one-on-one relationship, the same way a psychologist builds trust with a client over the course of sessions, or the way a doctor earns a patient’s trust from the moment they walk through the door.
That relationship can’t be artificially scaled or automated.
That’s exactly why it’s valuable.
Those are the people who will want to know more about you, go deeper, attend the event, devour the book you’ve spent years wanting to write, meet with you one-on-one to have a conversation and get the most value out of it.
Look for quality, not quantity.
How to Become an Alchemist
All of this sounds good on paper, but you came here looking for something actionable.
1. Build a vision, don’t chase trends
Spend time forming your own principles—ideas you’ve tested in your own life and stand by regardless of whether they’re trendy this week. This isn’t about ignoring the world, but you need to become known for your own ideas, words, and concepts.
2. Accumulate high-value ideas, not forgettable content
Instead of saving screenshots and sticky notes you never revisit, use a personal system where ideas can be cultivated. A Zettelkasten-style method where you jot down quotes and loose ideas, so that, over time, those scattered pieces start forming patterns you can turn into articles, books, and talks.
3. Think across disciplines
Real innovation happens when you connect the disconnected.
A principle from biology with a pattern from economics; a lesson from history with a discovery in neuroscience; philosophy blended with art. That’s how you generate combinations that no single-field specialist could ever produce. The broader your map of knowledge, the more connection points you’ll have to work with.
4. Build a reputation based on depth
This goes against what most platforms push you to do.
They reward quantity, as if your profile were a digital landfill. You need to do the opposite: less quantity, more intellectual density. More clarity in every piece. More originality, even if it means publishing less often. More humanity, even if it makes you slower than competitors churning out twenty posts a day with AI’s help.
You can use technology, sure—but in that direction, not just to run faster.
“Originality isn’t seen in individual words, or even in sentences. It’s seen in the architecture of your thoughts.” — Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did
What to Do Now
The bad news: you don’t become an Alchemist overnight.
The good news: every day you choose to think instead of just produce, every day you choose depth over speed, you’re building, piece by piece, an identity as a writer or artist—in any field—that can’t be replicated.
The race will still be there. Millions of people will keep running themselves to death.
You don’t have to be one of them anymore.
Stay creative.
— Álvaro
Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to dig deeper into:
How to Become So Creative It’s Scary (50 Ways to Generate Infinite Ideas)
The Wine Glass Technique: How to Write Deep Ideas and Still Go Viral
P.S. I also offer 1:1 consulting to help you grow on Substack.
If you’re just starting out and don’t know how it works, or if you’ve been at it for a while but are stuck, this will help you. I’ll help you find your direction, position yourself as a leader in your niche, and build a system tailored to your needs for sustainable growth.
My credentials? Over 96,000 global readers in 2 years, 100% organic growth, with 250,000 monthly visits. All from scratch, writing all by myself in my spare time.
If you’re interested, email me at: jardinmental@proton.me