Thoughts on AI Writing

More and more people are asking me about AI as it relates to brand content writing. Here’s my take:

AI-generated writing is good at going wide, but not so good at going deep (at least for now). Width versus depth is an important distinction, especially as it relates to storytelling. Where AI excels is in providing clean, polished and grammatically correct copy. But it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. For example, it doesn’t personally know your brand and all of the little nuances that make your story interesting.* Can it look you in the eye and probe for the  je ne sais quoi that is yours and yours alone? This is why a lot of AI-written brand copy sounds vaguely the same, no matter how dissimilar the brands in question. It’s like a taste you can’t get out of your mouth.

I’m not saying that AI isn’t useful or getting better by the day. I’m saying that high-end original writing isn’t obsolete—in fact, it’s becoming more valuable as things increasingly start to sound the same.   

*Hopefully you can tell that I wrote the copy pictured here, not AI