Why Pay Course Creators or Freelancers Now That AI Can Do It Too?
By Stacey Tallitsch | May 9, 2026
If you sell anything online (courses, freelance work, agency services, coaching, copywriting, design), you have probably had this thought lately. A customer pulls up ChatGPT and gets a draft of the thing they were going to hire you for. It is mediocre. But it exists. And it took them three minutes and cost them nothing.
The question that follows is honest and uncomfortable. If anyone with a free AI tool can do a passable version of what you charge for, why would they keep paying you?
I want to give you the straight answer rather than the cheerful one.
What is actually worth being worried about
Some kinds of online work are getting commoditized. That part is real. If your business depends on producing a generic version of something like generic blog posts, generic social captions, generic logo concepts, generic boilerplate code, or generic email sequences, the bottom is falling out of the price floor for that work.
Buyers who hired you because they could not write or design or code at all now have a tool that does the basic version for them. They will still pay for premium work. They will not pay you for a draft they could get for free.
The same is true for low-end course content. If your course is a structured walk-through of information someone could now ask an AI tool to explain to them on demand, the value is shrinking. The information was the product. The information is now free.
This is a real shift. If you are in this category, pretending it is not happening will not help you.
What is not worth being worried about
A lot of online work is not getting commoditized at all. The buyer's situation, taste, judgment, and constraints are still part of the work, and AI tools cannot do that part. A few examples.
A buyer who hires a copywriter does not just want words. They want someone who understands their brand, makes calls about positioning, pushes back when the brief is wrong, and takes responsibility when the campaign lands. The AI gives them a draft. It does not give them any of that.
A buyer who hires an agency does not just want deliverables. They want someone who notices when the strategy is off, brings expertise from work with similar businesses, manages the project, and is accountable when something breaks. The AI does not do that either.
A buyer who buys a course from a known operator is buying access to a person who has done the thing in the real world, made the mistakes, and can answer questions specific to the buyer's situation. A general explanation from an AI is not a substitute for that.
The pattern is consistent. AI commoditizes the artifact. It does not commoditize the relationship, the judgment, or the accountability.
What got cheap was the part of your work that was already cheap. The part that was actually valuable is still valuable. For the broader version of this argument, the recent post on whether AI is going to replace your employees makes the same case for hired staff. The same logic holds for individual operators selling their own work.
Here is a concrete example. A freelance copywriter I know was writing landing pages for $1,500 each. Her clients were small e-commerce brands. When the cheaper end of her market started using ChatGPT to draft their own pages, she lost two clients in a month. She could have panicked. Instead, she changed her offer. She now charges $2,500 to do the same landing page plus a 90-minute call where she rewrites the brand's whole positioning and tells the founder which products to feature. The AI cannot do the call. The clients who stayed with her think the new offer is a better deal than the old one, because they were never really paying for the words. They were paying for someone who could see their business clearly. She just made that part of the offer explicit.
What to actually do
Three things, in plain order.
One. Be honest about which side of the line your work falls on. If you are mostly producing generic artifacts an AI can now draft, you have a problem you have to solve. If you are mostly providing judgment, taste, accountability, or specific situational expertise, your business is more durable than the noise suggests. Most operators are some mix of both. Get specific about your mix.
Two. Move your offer up, not down. The trap is to compete with AI on price by producing more, faster, and cheaper. That is a race to zero. The escape is the opposite direction. Charge for the parts of your work AI cannot do. Charge for the conversation, the judgment call, the rework, the accountability, the access. Position the AI-draftable parts as included rather than as the product itself.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks self-employment trends across industries. Their data on self-employed workers shows that the categories holding their ground are the ones tied to specialized expertise and client relationships, not generic production work. The trend long predates AI. AI is accelerating it.
Three. Use the AI yourself. This is the one most operators resist, and it is the most important. The operators getting pushed out are the ones still hand-producing the artifact. The operators staying in business are the ones using the AI as a tool inside their work. They draft faster, explore more options, and get through low-value tasks quickly so they can spend more time on the high-value parts.
You do not need to become a power user. You need to use the basic tools (ChatGPT, Claude, the AI features in your existing software) competently enough that you are not slower than someone who never went to school for what you do. The bar is lower than you think.
A practical version of this for most online operators looks like the following. Use the AI to produce the first draft of the routine pieces of your work (outlines, first passes at copy, basic research, FAQ answers, social captions, simple code scaffolds). Then spend the time you saved on the parts of the work that need your actual brain. The output is better than what you used to ship, and you ship faster. Clients do not care that you used a tool. They care that the work is good and on time.
One warning here. Do not use the AI to produce the part of your work the client is actually paying you for. If you are a copywriter and the client is paying you to write the copy, do not ship a raw AI draft and pocket the difference. The client will figure it out. The trust is gone. Use the AI to do the parts of the work that are not the work, so you have more time for the work that is.
Permission to move at your own pace
If reading this gave you a knot in your stomach about your specific business, that is information. It does not mean you have to overhaul everything this week. It means you have a real question to think through about where your value actually is and where you should spend the next six months.
If reading this made your shoulders drop because you realized the work you do is the work AI cannot do, that is also information. Keep doing what you are doing. Use the AI to help you do more of it.
The operators who get hurt by this shift are not the ones who move slowly. They are the ones who do not look at the question at all. You are looking. You are already in better shape than most.
If you want a longer take on what is actually at stake when you have not started using AI yet, the earlier post on what is at risk if you have not started goes deeper on that question.
-- Stacey | The Standalone
About the Author
Stacey Tallitsch runs The Standalone, an AI Implementation Diagnostic practice for small business owners. He has 30 years of experience in technology and has written 21 books on systems thinking and decision-making. More than 30,000 students have learned from his online courses.
- Stacey Tallitsch, The Standalone