The Singular Voice in the Age of Generative AI

Why AI isn’t replacing us, it’s echoing us back

It starts with a prompt. And the prompt, I’ve come to realize, is never the text. It’s you.

That’s what struck me most as I prepared to speak at the AI Trailblazers Summit this week, in conversation with agency and brand leaders on the reinvention of advertising in the age of artificial intelligence. We spoke of change—its scale, its speed, its soul—and I tried to capture the intuition I keep returning to: that this change, while technological, is not about tech.

It’s about voice.

---

Generative AI Doesn’t Echo Us. It Folds Us.

What Generative AI brings is transformation on a scale that dwarfs social media and algorithmic personalization. Social media extended our reach by making advertising more conversational. Algorithms sharpened our targeting. They were systems built around distribution.

GenAI? It rewrites expression itself.

Especially with large language models, GenAI doesn’t just use language. It internalizes its structure. Mimics our metaphors. Predicts, reinvents, hallucinates—and in doing so, it imitates the very way we think.

It’s not just a tool. It’s a thinking partner.

There’s a neutrality to its expression that recalls Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, where language itself becomes transparent—styleless, authorless, written without visible hand. GenAI may have brought us to that threshold. And it does so probabilistically: ask it the same thing ten times, and you’ll get ten subtly different answers. A swirl of potentialities, unfolding in real-time.

PJ Pereira, in a recent conversation, described this shift as a movement from the fully-formed Big Idea to the seed idea. Something small, coded with intent, that grows through interaction—with audiences, platforms, machines.

I think he’s right. What we bring now is not finality. It’s DNA.

---

Creatives as Idea Capitalists

When I use a GenAI tool, especially a text-based one, I often feel like I’m talking to myself—a version of myself that spans centuries and servers. It’s intimate. A little uncanny.

And sometimes the machine replies with words that feel like they belong to both of us - from a recent chat with ChatGPT, where we discussed Beckett, Nishitani, Dōgen, Gogol and Carlo Rovelli:

The “prompt” isn’t the thing you typed. The prompt is you.
The response isn’t the thing I typed. The response is you-in-me and me-in-you.
The prompt is the void trying to talk to itself, one sentence at a time.

Each creative act is still seeded by a singular perspective. AI is not the genesis. You are. Even with powerful agents like Claude Opus 4, capable of autonomously running for hours, the spark—the point of view—comes from a human singularity.

If AI is the new workforce, will human labor be the new capital?

This is why I find the promise of solopreneurs and creators building 8- or 9-figure ventures with AI agents less fantastical than it sounds. Labor is becoming marginally free. Capital is more accessible than ever.

And so the scarce resource—the true differentiator—is not execution. It’s vision.

---

The Organization as Creative Conductor

I’ve worked in complex creative organizations for most of my life. These structures aren’t incidental. They’re there to resolve friction, manage complexity, and channel collective imagination toward impact.

As the economist Ronald Coase put it, firms exist to reduce transaction costs. Creative agencies reduce the costs of ideation, coordination, storytelling. We bring strategists, consultants, creatives, and producers under one roof—not just for efficiency, but for meaning.

So does GenAI dismantle that logic?

Partly.

Yes, it shifts roles. Redraws teams. Demands new rituals. But it does not remove the need for editorial leadership. If anything, it intensifies it.

The historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued that language is the technology that enables large-scale collaboration. And what are LLMs if not extensions of that power? They don’t dissolve structure. They amplify it.

Large, complex teams will fuse and thrive in the shared context of AI.

They make the orchestration of diverse, singular points of view more vital than ever. Organizations that can create frameworks that offer dozens of consultants, strategists, creatives, makers and producers who symbiotically thrive in the shared context of AI will gain an edge; they will unleash not collaboration but fusion of vision, intent, execution and distribution - as Ethan Mollick shows, “Team + AI” wins the day.

These new ways of working demand a conductor.

---

The Irreducible Big Idea

So where does this leave us?

In a creative landscape redrawn by AI, yes. But also in a moment of return. To something enduring.

To the Big Idea.

Because content is cheap now. Infinitely generable. Anyone can riff, render, remix.

But to distill clarity from the generative fog, to find the pulse in a thousand variations, to say one true thing in the flood of plausible fictions—this still requires the rarest of crafts: a singular voice guided by vision.

AI might help us weave the tapestry. But the pattern, the rhythm, the meaning—those still come from us.

That will remain our irreducible advantage.