Your book took you a year. Theirs took three minutes.

Let me set the scene.

Local coffee shop. A young entrepreneur across from me. He pastes one of my blog posts into an AI tool he built, and I watch a 180-page book materialize. Under three minutes.

I spent weeks on my 40-page e-book in 2022. Weeks of thinking, drafting, editing, wrestling with ideas. That felt like something. I hired an editor and a designer (shoutout Lenora Henson LLC). What I watched happen in that coffee shop? That felt like a magic trick performed by someone who doesn't quite understand what they're conjuring.

I'm not naive about AI. I use it. I think it's remarkable. But what I saw wasn't remarkable — it was a shortcut dressed as a product. And the implications are ugly: coaches, consultants, and self-proclaimed experts mass-producing books for pennies, stacking up a false résumé of wisdom they may not actually have, built on content they may not actually own.

The credential inflation from this will be brutal. And it's already happening.

So I did what any "normal" person would do in 2026: I went home, opened Claude, and asked it the uncomfortable question directly: what does this mean for people who actually want to share wisdom through writing, and what can they do?

I've linked the full response below. Read it if you've ever thought about writing a book — especially one with your name and your experience on it.

But here's the part I'll say without prompting:

We can sit on the sideline and complain about the amoral, unethical application of AI in how we share creativity and wisdom. Or we can go on offense. We are not helpless here. Not even close.

Go on f*cking offense.