“Using real-life experience to counter AI-generated mediocrity” is a creative position Raymond Hou (Raymond) gradually established as AI content tools became widespread. Its central claim is that when AI can quickly produce large volumes of predictable, polished knowledge content, a creator’s true moat is no longer the amount of knowledge they possess. It is the real experience only they have lived, carrying emotion and bias. Raymond sums up this position with a judgment: when knowledge becomes cheap, perspectives and experience become expensive.
This belief continues Raymond’s longstanding view of writing and can be seen as an extension of Writing Is the Best Investment for Ordinary People in the AI era. Previously, he emphasized “turning tacit knowledge into explicit assets.” In the AI era, he asks a further question: when machines can also organize knowledge, what remains that people can do and machines cannot replace?
Argument: AI Excels at Producing “Correct but Empty Words”
Raymond’s starting point is his observation about the nature of AI-generated content. Generative models are probabilistic models that tend to choose the “most probable” next word. As a result, their output is often correct and fluent, but also predictable and mediocre. In a strategy session for The Super Individual’s Way of Working, Raymond and creator Zhou Jia’en used information theory to explain this: good content is “high-entropy” information that can surprise readers; because AI optimizes for the most probable outcome, it tends to produce “low-entropy” content—words that seem correct but leave no impression.
This leads to Raymond’s prediction about future competition for content: the value of educational explainers and pure knowledge compilations will continue to fall because AI can write them faster and more comprehensively than people. What retains value is real-life experience full of emotion, bias, and detail—experience AI cannot invent from nothing.
Development: From “Knowledge Mover” to “Experiencer of Life”
Raymond turns this observation into a recommendation about the role of the Super Individual. He argues that future Super Individuals should stop being “knowledge movers” and become “experiencers of life”—using AI as an assistant to organize knowledge and freeing themselves to truly live, because only real life can produce high-value content that algorithms cannot predict.
This also corresponds to the division of labor Raymond repeatedly teaches in AI writing. He uses the IPO (Input, Process, Output) workflow to explain that the input—one’s own perspectives, experiences, and stories—must come from the person. AI is responsible only for polishing and editing in the middle, while the person remains responsible for final review. In other words, AI may change “how you express something,” but should not change “your point of view.” He also warns that overreliance on AI can weaken writing ability, using an analogy: playing Mario Kart does not mean one can drive an F1 car.
Zhou Jia’en’s Case: Dao, Technique, Method, and Tool; “Follow Your Heart”
A large part of this position was clarified through Raymond’s conversations with Zhou Jia’en and the process of turning those conversations into a Super Individual case study. Zhou Jia’en is a former comedian and viral Facebook writer who later launched an AI writing course. The two used four layers—“Dao, technique, method, and tool”—to analyze AI writing: many people get lost at the final “tool” layer (which model or prompt to use) and the “method” layer (headline and structure techniques), while the real deciding factors are “technique” (strategic positioning) and “Dao” (who I am). One remark by Zhou, which Raymond included in the case study, was: “The invention of the typewriter did not create more great writers.”1 Tools are neutral; what a person produces depends on the person.
Another idea from Zhou that influenced Raymond is “follow your heart and care for others”: following your heart means writing what you truly want to write; caring for others means making sure readers can understand it. In his summary, Raymond connects this back to his core belief: when writing is no longer only about chasing algorithms, but about clarifying “who I am” and addressing readers’ real pain points, creators can build a position that cannot be replaced amid the noisy information stream. This echoes his consistent claims that “loving what you do matters more than being good at it” and “don’t let tools you are good at limit your career.”
Evidence in Raymond’s Own Work
This position is consistent with Raymond’s own creative path. For years, he has used records of real life as a source of content. The 2023 smart work-from-home series exceeded one million views in a week because it came from the concrete experience of building and living in such a home, rather than from a quickly replicated knowledge summary. Continuing this logic, when Raymond began building an AI Agent counterpart in 2026, he positioned AI as an assistant for “organizing and execution,” not as the source of perspectives and judgments. This matches his division-of-labor principle for AI writing.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “Who Is Zhou Jia’en? From Comedian to AI Writing, Following His Heart and Using Real Experience to Counter AI Mediocrity,” WordPress article, 2025-12-25. View original ↩