As marketers or writers, nothing infuriates us more than having someone (usually a bad writer) take our work and run it through AI, thinking that version is going to be better.
I love generative AI. It proofreads my work. It helps me brainstorm ideas. It makes connections I didn’t think of. It even writes cover letters for me when archaic organizations still require them.
But I don’t want it to water down my unique perspective when I write for an online audience. AI is like a democratically elected government—it reflects the consensus but nobody is happy with it.
AI is not allowed to write my blogs and social posts. I could take out all the AI tells that people love to complain about (the lists of threes, actually, em dashes…), but it wouldn’t make a difference.
Writing is thinking, and if you outsource your thinking, you’re going to get something back that’s not yours. When you build a brand online, you want it to be something that’s recognizably yours.
What does that mean, writing is thinking? It means that if you sit with the words and rearrange them and use that lovely friend the dictionary, you’re increasingly gaining clarity about what you want to say.
You’re providing value to your readers by sharing original thoughts, but you’re also providing value to yourself by doing the hard work of improving your ideas and building a point of view that’s uniquely yours.
When you build a brand online, you want it to communicate something that’s uniquely yours. You want to be an authority, likely in a space that’s already crowded with competitors. When you use your own thoughts and your own voice, you build authenticity without trying.
AI was supposed to replace marketers and copywriters, and many of us indeed lost our jobs. But instead it is becoming clear that many people misunderstood the roles of marketers and copywriters.
They saw us as people who put words on a page, created campaigns and videos. How easy. Let’s automate that with AI.
Not so fast. Marketers and writers’ actual work is communicating with human audiences. And guess who has an edge trying to understand human beings and to connect with them? Other human beings.
In an age of automation, our uniquely formulated perspectives are the gold that people dig for with their scrolling.
The AI threat that was supposed to replace marketers and writers is instead turning into an opportunity for us. People who create original work will increasingly thrive thanks to the authentic value we create for human audiences. Even our silly spelling mistakes have become endearing.
Congratulations. Being a human being has just become next level.
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