Midline Monday: scaling mediocrity

Finding the alpha in an AI world.

Weekly Reflections

Justin Welsh published an essay last week that I understood before I finished reading the title: Mediocrity at scale.

His argument is simple. AI has handed every one of us the same easy button.

Whatever you do, you can now do a version of it a thousand times without thinking.

And the result isn’t excellence. It’s the average person getting more efficient at being mediocre.

Scaling mediocrity.

This lines up with my own experience.

AI is a remarkable way to get a 6 out of 10 output in a hurry. A competent draft. A decent summary. A passable plan. Fast, easy, and frictionless.

But if you ship at 6 out of 10, you’ve produced the same thing everyone else with the same “easy button” can produce, and it lands in the same undifferentiated pile.

And that pile just gets bigger: the easier creation becomes, the more people ship.

But there’s a second order consequence to all this that may be even more prodigious.

We’re not thinking any more.

Creating (the old way) forced us to think.

When I write, or draft an email, or build a presentation, I’ll have opinions, fragments, a scatterplot of half-formed ideas floating around in my head.

It’s the act of putting them into words where I discover all the gaps. The writing forces me to organize something messy into a narrative. To decide what I actually believe.

That’s the alpha.

This may help me more than it helps the reader. The finished piece is almost a byproduct. The real value happens during creation.

When you let the machine do the thinking, you get 100% of a 6/10 artifact and 0% of the understanding. So buyer beware.

There is value in getting to a 6 quickly. Use the tools. I certainly do.

But understand that world’s alpha lives between the 6 and the 10.

Everyone can reach the 6 now. The distance from good-enough to genuinely good, the part that demands you think, and care, and sit in the discomfort of a blank page, that’s where the value is hiding. And most people aren’t willing to go there.

That gap doesn’t close by pressing the button again.

It closes by doing things the easy button can’t do.

That’s the work.

Onward 🖤