--- Jasmine Sun, in The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI, Jun 2026
Subtitle
Jasmine Sun on why secrets, live presence, and a distinct voice matter more than ever in an AI-saturated world, and what independent creators need to build careers that machines can't replace
Excerpt
I’m going to introduce four ideas, or provocations, that have shaped the way that I think about AI and my own media career.
One: The value of summary will go down, and the value of secrets will go up.
Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public. The things that people have not said, things in whisper networks, the tacit knowledge, the open secrets that have never been put in the public domain—the journalist manages to pluck them out and make them public. When you persuade a source to tell you about some corporate malfeasance, or you venture to a remote town that few people have ever written about, or you sneak your way into a tiny underground party and talk about all the people who are there, you are working in a space where there is no training data.
