And AI Won’t Make You A Writer.
Years ago, as a photography student, I was given an assignment.
Interview a photographer. One subject. One conversation. Make it count.
I chose Amri Ginang — a fine art photographer whose work stopped you before you understood why. The kind of images that made you stand still in a gallery and feel something you couldn’t immediately name.
I showed up with my questions. My DATURA editor instincts are still running underneath — the same instinct that made me write letters to black metal bands in Norway, that made me ask the question nobody else asked.
“What do you think about photography today? What happens when everyone has a camera?”
He paused. Then he said something I’ve never forgotten:
“People are drawn to the technology. They grab a camera and call themselves photographers — not because they love the art. Because they have access to the tool. They don’t understand storytelling. They don’t understand the story behind the photo. The art of the photo.”
I wrote it down. Filed it away. Moved on with my life.
The Bridge
That conversation happened in 2010 or 2011. Instagram had just launched. Smartphones were everywhere. The first wave of “everyone is a photographer now” was already crashing.
Amri saw it happening in real time. And he named it clearly — before anyone had the language for it.
Now replace every instance of “camera” with “AI prompt” — and the conversation reads like it was recorded yesterday.
That’s not coincidence. That’s the permanence of a truth that doesn’t care what year it is.
Every generation gets a new tool that democratises creation. Every generation produces a flood of work that mistakes access for mastery. And every generation — eventually — rediscovers the same uncomfortable truth:
The tool was never the point.
What Amri Was Actually Saying
When I pushed him further, what separates the real photographer from the person who just has a camera? he didn’t talk about technique.
He talked about something harder to teach.
Vision. Empathy toward your surroundings. The ability to feel the story before you frame the shot. The understanding that composition, lighting, colour, these are tools in service of something bigger.
And then, the intangible. The emotion. The storytelling that happens before the shutter clicks. The out-of-frame decisions that determine what ends up in frame.
“Tool and emotion together,” he said. “That’s what makes a real visual storyteller.”
Neither alone is enough.
A tool without a human, technically perfect. Emotionally empty.
A human without a tool, has the story but struggles to tell it.
The real photographer, the real creator of anythin, is the combination.
2026. Same Conversation. Different Tool.
Today — everyone has access to AI.
Image generation. Writing. Video. Music. Design. Code.
The tools are extraordinary. Genuinely extraordinary. I use them. I’ve built a 30-day visual experiment with Midjourney that got warm leads on day four. I write with AI assistance. I’m not romanticising the pre-AI era.
But I’m watching the same pattern Amri described — playing out at a scale he couldn’t have imagined.
Content produced by the millions. Fed into algorithms. Optimised for attention. Manufactured for conversion.
Cheap. Fast. Everywhere.
And somehow, less valuable than ever.
Not because AI is bad. But because most people are using the tool without bringing the human.
The vision is missing. The empathy is missing. The story behind the content is missing.
They have the camera. They don’t have Amri’s eye.
The Commodity Problem
When everyone produces, content becomes noise.
When content becomes noise, attention becomes scarce.
When attention becomes scarce, only the content that carries genuine human weight breaks through.
Not the most optimised. Not the most frequent. Not the most AI-enhanced.
The most true.
The piece that someone stumbles upon five years from now and feels seen. Not because it commented on a trending topic. But because it captured something permanent about human experience.
Timeless. Not seasonal.
That’s the only content worth making now.
What This Means For You
If you’re using AI to produce content, good. Use every tool available.
But before you prompt, ask yourself Amri’s question:
Do I have a story to tell?
Not a topic. Not a trend. Not a content pillar.
A story. A vision. An empathy toward the person on the other side of the screen.
Because AI can execute at a level none of us could match manually.
But it cannot replace the 30 years of quietly noticing things that make your specific observation worth reading.
It cannot replace the night you stood in a record store in Felda and felt something you couldn’t explain looking at a Metallica album cover.
It cannot replace the morning you served water to a quiet billionaire on a night flight to London and finally understood what luxury actually means.
It cannot replace the interview you did with Amri Ginang — years before any of this existed — that turns out to be more relevant today than the day you wrote it.
That’s your content.
The AI sets the table. You decide what gets served.
The Interview Proved Its Own Point
I went back and read my Amri Ginang interview recently.
It was written years ago. Analogue era. No AI. No content strategy. No algorithm to optimise for.
Just a student with good questions and an editor’s instinct.
And it’s more relevant today than the day I wrote it.
That’s not luck. That’s what timeless content looks like.
Amri wasn’t talking about cameras.
He was talking about you, right now in 2026.
Read the interview here
P.S. At Majalah BIKIN, I write about human experience, UX, and business psychology — drawn from 30 years across airlines, banking, design, and the field. Read more and follow along at majalahbikin.com