Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
The companies spending $100B+ building AI that generates infinite text are now paying $775,000 for humans who can make people care about that text.
Netflix posted a comms director role at $775K. OpenAI is listing comms jobs above $400K. Anthropic tripled its communications team to 80 people last year, each making $200K+. The average comms director in the US makes $106K.
These companies are paying 4-7x market rate. That tells you something about how desperate the narrative race has become.
Software engineer job postings dropped by 60,000+ between 2023 and late 2025. CS grads now face 6.1% unemployment. Comms grads? 4.5%. The field that was supposed to be automated first is now outperforming the field everyone said was automation-proof.
And it makes sense when you think about what actually happened. AI flooded the zone with content. LinkedIn became unreadable. Every company blog sounds identical. The supply of words went to infinity, which means the value of any individual word went to zero.
So now the scarce resource is judgment. Knowing what to say, when, to whom, and why it matters. Andreessen Horowitz literally launched a team to help founders “win the narrative battle online.” Adobe is hiring an “AI evangelist” to do “AI storytelling.”
The companies that automated writing are now paying more than ever for writers. That premium isn’t going away. It’s going to accelerate as every company sounds the same and the ones that don’t become worth billions more.
