A few weeks ago, I admitted to my online tech writer friend Fabrizio of Passo.uno that I  wrote a whiny journal entry about how overwhelmed I was about the amount of things I have to learn about AI.

At the end of the conversation, I asked him to write a blog post about how we technically inclined writers can cope with the speed of change in AI tech and learn fast.  He kindly obliged me in a day, writing this fantastic post: Advice for tech writers on a job hunt in the AI age

I love his suggestions, especially #2, which is my favorite way to learn: create your own projects. I found #1 a bit challenging. Books and courses are my go-to way of learning. But it’s true what he said: things are changing so fast now that by the time a book is out, it’s already old news. 

How I first reacted to LLMs

Before I talk about how overwhelmed I feel about the amount of learning I had to do, I’ll have to go back to the past a bit.

When AI first landed, and I saw what ChatGPT could do, my heart sank. I knew that the content profession would change yet again. It was particularly discouraging  back then because I was just getting my feet steady as a technical writer. Although I was pretty confident my profession would never disappear, I knew that layoffs were coming. 

Like most writers then, I was resentful of what Big Tech did with AI. However, I wasn’t exactly upset that they sucked up our work, and trained their AI with it. I was more upset that they did that and then locked the technology derived from our work behind paywalls. If we had a hand in creating the damn tech, we bloody well should have a right to the tech. Worse, since most of these services are denominated in US dollars, this left out a lot of the Global South people who had weaker currencies.

By placing LLM technology behind paywalls, they’re essentially creating an ecosystem of “haves” and “have-nots”. Those who can afford LLM tech (the richer folks) can advance in productivity and skills while the poorer ones are left in the dust.

Fortunately, the DeepSeek moment happened, and now open source LLMs are serious competition to these gated tech services. That’s why I’m pretty grateful to DeepSeek for the movement they sparked. Thanks to open source models, the Global South have a fairer shot at development and modernization now.

Anyway, I digress.

The DeepSeek moment melted away my resentment and I immediately knew that I had to upskill using AI. Fast. Fortunately, I’m a tech nerd who loves playing around with software, and have a natural inclination for learning software. Heck I write technical documentation and blog posts about technological services like app rationalisation, data centre to cloud migrations and stuff. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for all writers.

A merciless time: Anti-AI writers will be left behind

Writers have not been exactly receptive about AI tech; the creative writing communities are especially virulent about the use of AI in your writing workflows. (Each time I write about using AI in my fiction writing workflows, I inevitably get aggressive hate-filled comments.)

It’s not just about generating copy; some don’t even want you to use AI to edit the copy, which is ironic since tools like Grammarly and ProWritingAid have been using it pretty actively.

For those of us working in the professional content space, we don’t have the luxury to ignore AI or write Substack essays about why we hate it. It’s either learn the skills or have someone who knows AI skills replace you. It’s just the reality in the corporate world now.

I’ve been a professional writer since the 1990s when I was stringing for the national newspaper and writing ad copy for advertising agencies, “faxing” it to them via a clunky, beeping fax modem.

After being a journalist from 2000-2018 (with a break of a few years  in between when I had fantasies of being a nurse), I transitioned to the corporate world, working in corporate and government communications and then finally in the tech world where I’ve honed my skills as a technical communicator.

Having lived through the journalism profession’s collapse thanks to the Internet,  this is not my first rodeo with technology decimating my profession. When AI emerged with ChatGPT I sighed wearily knowing that I will have to go through a rough transition yet again.

AI has evolved so much and so quickly beyond ChatGPT’s debut in 2022. Now, it’s not about writing the best prompts anymore. Sure it’s still important, but we’ve entered the agentic era where the “AI native” is an orchestrator of agents. Meaning, people are now increasingly managers of “talent”. However, instead of a team of people beneath you, you now manage a team of AI agents. Your work is as good as the AI agents you build.

Many writers in the creative field—the novelists, the ones hoping for a traditional publishing deal—are still stuck with the notion that AI is a chatbot and people use it to generate whole novels with a click. They don’t realize that AI has moved on beyond that. Instead they are picking fights with writers who are trying to learn to improve their workflows with AI.

Yes, I’m annoyed by them, but  I also grieve for them. I 100% understand why they are behaving this way. But taking out your anger and frustrations at fellow writers isn’t productive. They spend all that energy trying to bring other writers down when they could be learning from them instead. 

They don’t realize how much they’re being left behind. Instead of spending their time and energy fighting writers who use AI in their workflows, they truly need to learn the tech because there’s an overwhelming amount to learn. The writers who are ahead of them in using the tech are freely sharing their knowledge online. They could learn from them instead of insulting them in the comments section.

I suppose the only saving grace for these writers is that most  are not corporate writers but write fiction etc. So, the consequences would not be as severe for their career growth. I hope.

This season, the new skill professional content folks like me have to learn is context engineering and content engineering. As our bosses learn about what AI can do, the pressure flows downwards to us content professionals to execute their vision. Sometimes their  vision is limited by the technology (meaning, we’re often not there yet), sometimes – and this is a danger to content professionals – it’s limited by the speed we can learn.

And here’s the thing, not every writer out there can learn AI tech easily.

I’ve spoken to some writers and they blank out the moment I say things like “instance” and “markdown”. For one, I’m still trying to convince most of them to have their own websites, but many reply that they prefer to use Facebook because it’s easier. So, what more using LLMs to increase their productivity?

Learning fast, learning messily

When I got over my resentment of LLMs, I had quickly started experimenting with the tools and learning the concepts. First with chatbots, then with IDEs and coding agents. I started keeping a prompt library, then building AI workflows, continuing tweaking them when they turned out disastrous output. I looked for use cases from those generous enough to document them online and tried to replicate what they did.

There was no teacher, no guide. I only had my learning abilities to help me. Fortunately, having transitioned from journalism to content strategy and then technical writing and UX copywriting with YouTube videos, blog posts, books and quick-and-dirty experiments, I’ve had a lot of practice.

The fortunate thing about our age is that free content is everywhere. Yes, some content creators will tease you that they will teach you everything about AI only to gate their most important resource behind a $1000 course. Fortunately, we have many who are willingly putting out content that could power a course freely on YouTube and in their blogs. If you’re good with research, you can dig out many free resources on the Internet. On top of that, Big Tech, eager for more people to use their tools, are putting out valuable courses – often free. Take them.

So, that’s how I’ve been learning. From content creators on YouTube or blog spaces, from  Google and Anthropic courses. By running clumsy experiments.

However, lately, all this seems not enough.

Perhaps it’s due to my flagging energy levels due to a health issues a few months ago. Perhaps it’s  due to absorbing and being exposed to the hate, vitriol and blather from the fellow writers in the writing world as I try to learn and document my journey. Perhaps it’s an accumulation of all  this and managing the increasing expectations that I can 10x  my personal or work content workflows. (It’s still unrealistic; people need to understand how much human involvement is crucial in content creation. “Human taste” is hard to quantify or replicate with AI.)

The truth is, I’m tired, I need a break, but the AI companies are not giving me one and neither is the industry, whose expectations of its workers are rising by the day.

So, yes, when I had that conversation with Fabrizio, I was burned out having to juggle all of this. Fabrizio wanted me to turn my whiny journal entry into a blog post, and I told him I definitely would but I wanted to sit with it so that the blog post won’t turn out to be a mere rant and my version of old content writer yelling at the clouds.

I wanted this post to be a letter of sorts to my fellow  professional writers out there – I see you, I get what you’re going through. It’s bloody tough, but somehow we will get through this. I will try to help as best as I can.

As for me, I don’t want to just continue the way I am at hyperspeeds, burning myself out. What I need is a better learning strategy and a better way to manage the stress levels.

My realization: Learning needs to be more focused and deliberate

A while back I read a story about this software engineer who told his wife  that he needed her to take care of the kids and do the homework more so that he can focus on being an AI native in his tech company.

In an industry where software engineers are being laid off almost every day, I can almost hear the desperation in his voice even if the feminist in me wants to throw up in the corner at the sacrifice he’s asking of his wife.

So, right after he came back from work, he would spend hours at night studying and running projects with AI.

Fortunately, he managed to become one of the few AI natives in his company. Whether he has gone back to doing his share of childcare is debatable, however.

Unfortunately for me, I do not have a hubby to ask this favour, so I have to make do. 

But, it got me thinking – what am I wasting time on that I could use to learn the skills I need to be AI native?

Unlike SWEs, I don’t have the technological foundation in programming to give me a leg up. So, my learning curve is much higher. On top of that, most of the videos and resources about AI are targeted at software engineering. This meant that I needed to be more focused and deliberate in my learning.

One thing for sure, is that I need to be stricter with my consumption of information. What’s the point of listening to an hour of an Ed Zitron anti-AI podcast if all it does is annoy and amuse me? Do I really need to listen to YouTubers and podcasters who constantly hype up or rant about the newest AI models (especially since it does nothing for writing), latest controversy/scandal or Big Tech “sin”? 

So I need to trim out this unhelpful (albeit extremely entertaining) content, because that hour of listening could be used to learn the latest skill.

Another thing: I’ve been learning “between the cracks of life”. For example, watching a YouTube video while on the train, while wolfing down lunch or as I nod off to sleep.

As a result, I’ve not systematically documented what I’ve learned nor do I have a proper strategy in studying or retaining what I learned. Which means constantly forgetting what I’ve learned and losing precious resources. So, that meant a) scheduling deliberate blocks of time to learn, perhaps during the weekends b) a systematic way of documenting what I learned.

There’s also the added layer of “advertising” yourself as an AI native. Sure, you can build agentic workflows for content, but do people know about it? Writers are often icky about self promotion, but in our age I think it’s not just smart but unavoidable. The loudest gets noticed. The loudest gets the jobs.

It’s a LOT.

If SWEs are overwhelmed, imagine us content professionals whose resources are thin and often gated behind expensive courses.

My next action steps:

1. Stop consuming unhelpful (and toxic) content about AI.
2. Schedule a block of time during the weekend to learn a specific skill.
3. Document what I learn in Obsidian.
4. Build more AI projects.
5. Learn in public by teaching others what I’ve learned. (It’s the best way to bake the learning in your brain, and it’s a way of giving back to the community.)
6. Start owning the content engineer label because by golly I’m already doing the work of a semi-AI engineer might as well call myself.

If you’re a content professional, how are you managing your work and upskilling efforts in the age of AI?