title: @CristinCulver: AI was supposed to 'democratize writing.' Instead it created a scarcity problem....
author: CristinCulver
content_type: twitter_article
published: 2026-02-03T20:59:10+00:00
source_url: https://x.com/CristinCulver/status/2018791393213227410
word_count: 701
AI was supposed to 'democratize writing.' Instead it created a scarcity problem.
Tech companies are now paying $200-450K+ for communications roles, not because words are harder to produce, but because
meaning
is harder to land. Netflix is offering $775K for a director of product and tech comms. Anthropic tripled its comms team to 80 people, each making $200K+. OpenAI has roles listed above $400K.
The average director of communications makes $106K.
Something has shifted.
Everyone's a writer. No one is a writer.
Scroll LinkedIn right now, I dare you. It's a slop factory. Emdashes abound. It's endless AI-assisted insights that sound like they were written by the same person, because functionally, they were. The prose is smooth, the structure is clean, the thinking is absent - or just meh and completely vanilla because it blends with the entire timeline. So many emojis and arrows.
If you can prompt your way to content, you're not rare. You're abundant.
What's rare is the person who has the instincts and experience to know what to say, when to say it, and why it matters. The communicator who understands narrative, timing, taste, and culture well enough to cut through instead of contributing to the pile of slop.
That person is suddenly
very
expensive.
The rebrand is actually a return to what matters.
The term "storyteller" is having a moment. People went crazy for the
WSJ "Storyteller" article
. LinkedIn job postings mentioning it doubled between 2024 and 2025. I even added it to my
own Linkedin profile
to see what happens. But this isn't a new role! It's a rebrand of what's always existed: the comms leader working hand-in-hand with the founder, holding the soul and narrative of the company, translating vision into belief.
What's changed is the context and the noise level. In a world where anyone can generate content, the strategic communicator who can
see and translate
culture, predict where attention is moving, read a news cycle, and shape narrative with precision became the high-value hire.
It's not that storytelling recently got invented. It's that then it got scarce.
Twist in the plot: AI companies are building in the real world
Here's where it gets interesting.
The same AI companies whose tools created the slop problem are now storytelling their way out of it—tactically, in physical spaces.
Anthropic opened Claude Café in New York
, filled with books, magazines, hats, and human connection. The messaging was crystal clear: come think, not scroll.
Cursor did the same thing
Stripe built a tiny model city
for Black Friday.
Base Power Company launched a real newspaper
Ramp created a physical CFO office
in the middle of New York.
These are
very online
companies going offline to storytell. And it's working—not just as marketing, but as narrative strategy. Each activation creates thousands of other individual storytellers: people who interact with the brand, then tell their own story about it.
AI made infinite content possible. These companies understood that taste, incredible design, physicality, constraint, and craft would cut through.
AI is the co-pilot, not the output
The smartest communicators saw this early. They're 5 steps ahead. They're using AI to accelerate creation—research, drafting, iteration—but the final product is deeply human. Judgment, taste, timing, voice. The stuff that doesn't automate. The stuff that takes years to percolate.
Some of these people are consultants now (hello, it's me!), running $20K–$50K/month retainers across multiple clients. Some are making making near seven figures helping founders storytell in a world that's an all-you-can-eat buffet of words, but starving for meaning.
The "Golden Age of Comms' is real, if you can actually write
Steve Clayton, Cisco's CCO, said it plainly in Amanda Hoover's
Business Insider story today
: "It's a golden age for people who really enjoy the craft of communications."
He's right. Not because the job got easier. Because the environment made bad writing so abundant that good writing became a competitive advantage again.
Words are free now. Clarity is expensive.
If everyone's a writer, nobody is.
This article was inspired by my chat with
Amanda Hoover at Business Insider
for this article:
The Hottest Job in Tech: Writing Words
. Give it a read, too.
Posted: 2026-02-03T20:59:10.000Z
Engagement: 29 likes, 0 retweets, 5 replies