Everyone now has a future prediction about AI and human writers.

Almost all of them begin with “I might be wrong, but..”. No one knows exactly what will happen.

In this article, I’ll be sharing my opinion. It’s a strong one, but it’s not about what will change. It’s about the things that won’t change. The things that will never change. For context, let’s first discuss how I feel about AI-generated writing.

It makes me cringe

For me, reading AI writing is just a dreadful experience.

I use writing as a tool to express myself and connect with other humans. So I feel a loss of meaning when I read an article that another human hasn’t expressed, but copy-pasted from a robot.

I’ve been afraid (no lie)

I’ve been a copywriter, content writer, and now, a ghostwriter. My writing services have been a major source of my income. So naturally, it makes me tense to read about AI potentially eating up writers’ jobs and businesses.

“AI will replace writers” can mean one of two things:

1. Soon, AI will get so advanced that we won’t be able to distinguish between AI and human writing.
2. Robot-generated writing will become the accepted norm. “We don’t mind sounding like robots as long as our writing efforts are reduced.”

Either way, there’s a collective fear on social media that human writers won’t be needed anymore.

Why copy-pasted AI writing is bad for marketing and content creation:

In life and business, we want humans to guide us.

We want resonance, not perfection. Here’s what I mean—

If I want to solve a problem, facts and solutions alone won’t help me solve it. What I really need is someone who also understands my uncertainty, empathizes with me and tells me that it’s okay for me to have that particular struggle.

What I’m really looking for is the mistakes, successes, and pattern recognition another human has internalized by solving the same problem for themselves. I need someone who can laugh, cry, and suffer like me. If there’s a connection, it will create resonance and help me solve my problem. A robotic list of perfect solutions won’t work.

AI can’t give me that resonance.

Not without a human behind the AI.

So when I come across a new product or service that will ‘supercharge’ my efforts, ‘foster’ growth, and ‘unlock’ my dreams, I know there’s no thoughtful human there.

And I leave.

We can’t factory-produce thought leadership marketing:

Our expert insights give us the chance to resonate, educate, and build trust with our audiences.

Done right, it can have a positive compounding effect in the future. Done carelessly, it can make us forgettable. Thought leadership is the precursor to the sale and is built by sharing experiences, not plain information. It has nuance, personalization, and most importantly, thought.

It’s something AI can’t generate without humans.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Think about your favorite movie.

Mine is ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’.

Now, do you think it’s possible to make the movie with text-to-video AI prompts? Technically, you could. But it won’t inspire, entertain, or educate unless a human adds their thought process or personal experience to the messaging. There’s got to be nuanced storytelling.

Marketing is no different.

It serves the same purpose as a movie— to inspire, entertain, and educate.

That’s why AI content creation feels empty without human intervention.

In that sense, AI can never replace human writers:

AI can efficiently list the things we may feel, but it can’t feel. AI helps establish the ‘dots’. But only humans can connect the dots through their insights.

Here’s what made me stop cringing and fearing AI and start loving it:

I realized that all along, I never cringed at AI writing. I was actually cringing at the way people write with AI.

3 ways I changed how I look at it:

1. AI will make a good writer unstoppable, but it can’t turn a bad writer into a good one.
2. At best, AI can write like you, but it can’t think like you (and thinking is 90% of the process of good writing).
3. We can drop the fear and stigma around AI taking our jobs if we simply replace the word ‘AI’ with ‘software’ because that’s precisely what it is. Something that simplifies our efforts.

How I write with AI now— I let it ‘do’ for me. Not think for me.

Some of the ways it makes my writing process way better than if I didn’t use it:

• It helps kickstart my ideation by prompting and suggesting ways to present things
• It helps create article structures and outlines so I can simply fill in the details
• I don’t copy-paste, I integrate— as if I’m using an idea from a movie, book, or experience
• I’ve invested my time in engineering and iterating prompts that have automated much of my writing process (That’s a separate skill altogether and there’s a specific way to do it right)

Remember:

AI is a thinking and working tool, not a thought. What we should be writing is our thoughts.

AI will not replace writers but will replace their old ways of doing things. It can only replace repetitive activities and that’s not how we humans are. We are not repetitive. We are unpredictable, nuanced, and even crazy in some ways.

That’s the nature of content creation and marketing, too.

No formula. Just ‘aha’ moments.

‘Aha’ moments come from our subconscious mind.

We either experience them or we don’t.

If they were predictable, we wouldn’t call them ‘aha.’

See you next week.

– Abhi

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P.S. If you'd like me to write thought leadership articles for your business so you can drive more sales, book a FREE discovery chat here.

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