The “AI took my job” thing? It already happened.

An algorithm radically reconfigured my role as a content curator at YouTube, long before half of LinkedIn had considered the possibility.

You can even read about it in a book, Bloomberg journalist Mark Bergen ’s history of YouTube, Like Comment and Subscribe.

To make matters worse, I was a cool hunter, no less (as Bergen dubbed the members of YouTube’s editorial team).

For context, I was an early adopter of online video.

A content creator before that was a name for whatever that was.

One of my videos even made YouTube’s coveted, high-traffic homepage, at a time when everyone saw the same page, regardless of their own interests.

Then, following a few stints with smaller “me too” video companies, I made the leap to being YouTube’s Comedy Editor.

As the job title implies, I had the rather enjoyable task of finding other comedy videos I thought worthy of a spot on the homepage.

Or at least pitch them for consideration to our curator-in-chief, Mia Quagliarello, balancing out our various vertical passions.

It felt like what a newspaper editorial office looks like in a movie.

The sports guy. The music lady. The politics editor. A film editor. A cool hunter for “how to…” videos.

And me, the comedy guy.

Politics guy Steve Grove (who went on to be a literal newspaper publisher) would fly out to Davos, as YouTube became a game-changing channel for citizen journalism on a global scale.

And I cool hunted the best sketch comedy videos.

Basically the same thing, but for different editorial patches, right?

Davos. Jokes. Basically, more or less, the same, right?

Until the day we were shepherded into a conference room where a product manager introduced us to the pending reality of an algorithm personalizing the homepage.

To make it more relevant to more users. Which makes sense.

Or, as I thought at the time, “wait a minute… Your job is to eliminate my job

What actually happened is the algorithmic feed "freed us all up" to do less interesting things

At first (and this is relevant to the AI of it all….) the “personalized” homepages were kinda trash.

And would be (in the not-at-all-biased eyes of a recently-deseated content curator) kinda trash for quite some time.

With the algorithm tweaked for a ‘watch time’ metric, my homepage served up lengthy video-game walk-throughs I had no interest in watching.

And occasionally my own videos, which felt closer to my interests (ahem).

Though I already knew about them, and viewed this as evidence of how bad this algorithmic feed could be.

But, as we say about AI in general, “you do realize, this is as bad as it’s going to be?”

Today, YouTube has a pretty good handle on what I like.

It took quite a while to get there.

But the notion that half a dozen people (cool hunters, even!) sitting in a room, picking one universal homepage feed for all visitors seems, now, rather quaint.

It neither personalizes nor scales, as some dry Google lifer would no doubt say.

And YouTubeTV is now my cable-cutter content provider, years on from mainstream media wanting nothing to do with the stolen-IP hosting bastards.

Just as the Google suits wished it to be.

It just took a while.

That's not to say there's not a place for human curation, be it Substacks, music podcasts, niche video site Vimeo's editorial picks or whatever.

But the user experience of the world's biggest video repository was not, perhaps, for a half dozen people sitting in a room to decide on forever.

So, LinkedIn life lesson, if we must?

The AI thing that replaces/augments some part of your job might seem absurdly, wildly, mind-bogglingly unqualified to do so now.

But that’s not its forever-state.

And AI gets better at doing AI things a lot faster now than it did when an algorithm radically reconfigured my content curation career.

Is that cool?

Maybe not if it’s wiping away the effort required to build your hard-earned creative skill set.

But just because something’s cool, doesn’t mean it’s forever.

If anything, cool’s always been a moving target.

And you can, if you wish, do cool things with AI that won’t be the same as the cool things you did before.

Cool as in, I think my teenage self would think this was the coolest thing ever.

It wasn't always easy being the weirdest kid in his suburban Scottish school, so I do a lot on his behalf. Weird at scale, sometimes.

Cool as in I make things on my phone that both thrill me and show me that some of my old ways of doing things are increasingly less “monetarily valuable” than they once were.

And if it means that someone can make a thing without having quite so many hurdles to get there?

I love that.

More on “friction fetishization” later.

Ironically, my interest in generative AI was less to do with “because AI took my job away” and more to do with what drew me to YouTube in the first place.

As a creative outlet.

I'm not naive.

When people ask me “aren’t you worried…” I can say, the notion of AI taking away (or radically reconfiguring, in this case…) my job isn’t theoretical.

I was into that (or rather, not into that, but it happened anyway….)  before it was cool.

And I was, ironically, a cool hunter.

Till the algorithm took me down.

And I eventually bounced back, weirdly enough, creating things with algorithms.

I'm a guy who creatively embraces the potential of generative AI tools. Not an "AI bro".