Your Prompt
I created the following [article/email/video script/presentation/social post].
Do not review the grammar, formatting, or production quality.
Instead, evaluate whether the piece is likely to create a meaningful realization for the audience.
1. What is the central idea or realization this piece is trying to create?
2. Is that realization clear, or does it get buried beneath examples, stories, or explanations?
3. Which sentence or section is most likely to stick with the audience a week later?
4. Where does the piece drift into information instead of insight?
5. What assumptions, beliefs, or perspectives might change after someone consumes this?
6. Which parts feel predictable or forgettable?
7. What is the strongest counterargument to the core idea, and does the piece address it?
8. Give me three specific ways to make the piece more memorable, thought-provoking, or perspective-shifting without making it longer.
Judge the work based on its ability to influence how someone thinks, not on the effort that went into creating it.
Against The Grain
For years, I had a perfectly reasonable excuse for not creating a web comic.
I can't draw.
That seemed like a pretty significant limitation for someone who has longed to make the kind of comics I grew up on.
Then AI showed up.
Now I can generate characters. I can move objects around. I can maintain visual consistency. I can do, in a few minutes, work that I've attempted to learn many times in the past.
And the result has been both exciting... and humbling.
Because it turns out that drawing was not the thing I should have been focused on. That was just one limitation.
Creating a great comic requires more than the ability to draw faces and hands.
The power of Calvin and Hobbes was never just Bill Watterson's artwork - as beautiful as it often was.
Gary Larson's style was rough, yet The Far Side remains a masterclass in single-panel communication.
The drawings were important. But plenty of people can draw.
Far fewer can make you laugh with 10 words or less.
Far fewer can make you feel, lovingly poke at a fault, or create a perspective shift that still plays out 30 years later.
The drawing was a means to an end.
The goal was to change something in the reader.
That's true for comics. It's true for books. It's true for YouTube.
It's true for leading a team. It's true for building a company.
The point was never the production.
The point was influence.
People often argue that AI-generated content can't be effective because it lacks authenticity, creativity, humanity, or emotional depth.
Maybe.
But maybe that's more a reflection on how quick we are to say, "Eh, that's good enough to pass."
Most human-created content doesn't change hearts and minds. So most probably won't after AI either.
AI is just the latest in a long line of tech removing our excuses.
The cost of production is collapsing.
The technical barriers are falling.
The gatekeepers are disappearing.
And as those obstacles disappear, we're each left facing a more human question:
Can I actually create something worth paying attention to?
For years, someone could say, "I'd write if I had more time."
Or, "I'd make videos if I had better equipment."
Or, in my case, "I'd create comics if I could draw."
Those excuses are gone.
What's left is the difficult work of figuring out what makes another human being stop, think, laugh, care, or act.
AI can help me draw a comic. Whether it does anything is still up to me.
