Your AI is showing

One big fat love letter to human writers

I don’t know if it’s just my echo chamber, but my social feeds are filled with what is very, very obviously AI-generated content at the minute. I can’t scroll for five minutes without being exposed to some horror.

In my down time, it’s tiny, AI-generated horses doing AI-generated dressage on TikTok, or similar. At work, it’s the most generic “how I grew my follower count” articles on LinkedIn, each one punctuated with just a few too many rocket emojis for anybody’s liking.

It's everywhere.

And as I move to a freelance role where every day will involve trying to persuade clients to pay me for what ChatGPT claims to do for free, I’ve been thinking a lot about why people would still value human writers.

But unfortunately, I can’t really bring myself to be fair or nuanced or rational about it. Because I struggle to wrap my head around why anyone would ever trust a computer to write in the first place.

Administrative emails and summaries? Fine. To do lists and schedules? Fine. Research, proofing, and the odd grammatical edit? Also fine. (In fact, I go into a lot more detail about how I use AI for the odd work task here.)

But drafting? Absolutely not.

And it’s not just because the majority of large language models are trained in a suuuuuper questionable way, ethically speaking. (Though that is a thing. See Daisy Buchanan’s post on this which speaks about it more eloquently than I ever could).

It’s because AI content is boring. You can engineer the best, most creative prompt in the world, and ChatGPT will still regurgitate the most generic/popular/commonplace output based on other content that already exists on that topic. By its very nature, AI can’t give you anything truly original. And that’s where it’s always going to fall short.

Last week, I read an excerpt from Ashley Hickson-Lovence’s The 392, a book set entirely on a London bus travelling from Hoxton to Highbury over 36 minutes.

It catapulted me five years back in time and 350 miles south.

Just a couple of sentences, and suddenly, I wasn’t in my living room anymore, I was on my morning commute through Clapham, wedged in next to a stranger, waiting for Southwark to appear on the horizon so I could breathe fresh air again.

And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Experience. Hickson-Lovence wrote The 392 as only someone who has faced hour after hour of grim London bus commutes ever could — and I know this, because I have faced hour after hour of grim London bus commutes, too.

I loved it. And, as a passionate little Joan Didion wannabe, I think all good writing should aim to stir something like that in its readers.

AI could never have written The 392, because AI has never stood at a busy London bus stop waiting for a double decker in the rain knowing they’re not going to get home and dry for the next 12 hours. It doesn’t know how it feels when you’ve stepped in a big puddle and water is starting to seep into your trainers — a little bit more with every step. It doesn’t know how it feels to clamber onto a stuffy bus and haul yourself up the stairs while your hood bunches up around your neck and the strap of your bag slips down your shoulders but you can’t adjust it because you’re carrying too many things and trying to stay upright at the same time.

And it works across all genres and situations. AI won’t be able to write heartbreak because it doesn’t know how it feels to check your phone for the seventeenth time in an hour and see that, no, they still haven’t text. How that sad pang of disappointment is expertly paired with a red-hot shame at yourself for checking again in the first place.

It won’t be able to write joy because it has never had a sleepy family dog that, given the choice of all the cosy spots to nap, chose your legs.

It’ll never be able to write insecurity because it has never checked Instagram to see its friends hanging out without them. Or grown up watching the world call Renee Zellweger playing Bridget Jones fat. Or had a boy in school point out that you’ve got more peach fuzz than the other girls.

And it’s not just fiction that suffers with AI, either.

All the things I mentioned above are fundamentally human experiences. And even the most boring/dry marketing content, when done right, should draw on human experiences.

AI won’t be able to sell your cybersecurity solution because it’ll never know how it really feels to work for years to get hundreds of customers to trust you with their data, then head downstairs one morning to find you’re locked out of your own account while everything you’ve worked for is pilfered for some cheap internet scam.

AI won’t be able to sell your soft drink because AI doesn’t know how it feels to wake up, more hungover than you ever thought possible, mouth dryer than the Sahara, and have to walk directly up a steep hill to the corner shop, sweating, but knowing that first sip of Lucozade is going to be so, so worth it.

Human writers might not have experienced each of these things exactly, but you best believe they’ve experienced similar disappointment, or relief, or fear, or joy, or whatever else that they can tap into to stir up real feelings with their content. Because, as humans, we get other humans.

AI can’t truly, deeply get us. The highs and lows. The mundane things. The arguments. The waiting for a delivery between 8am and 10pm. Getting jealous. Making a cup of tea then realising there’s no milk. Getting a promotion. Finishing a good book. Snapping at someone you love. Finishing a bad book. Apologising.

AI misses out on everything that is part of the human experience. It can only go by what everyone else has said about it, like some bland, drawn-out reflection.

So no, don’t use AI to draft what should be coming from you. Use it to brainstorm, translate, research, fact-check, proof, and edit (as long as you promise you’re not going to give it free rein). But if you’re drafting something you genuinely want people to read, and you’re doing it because you believe in whatever it is you’re drafting — just do it yourself, even if it’s imperfect.

I promise, more people are going to bother to read something when they can tell you bothered to write it.

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About The Content Girl

Opinions, insights, and the occasional marketing musing from a professional Content Writer giving writing in her own voice a go. You can expect:

• Commentary on pop-culture/regular culture and the like

• Insights/tips/information around professional Content Writing/Marketing and freelancing

• Personal essays (I’ll try to make these not insufferable, I swear)

• Book reviews, recommendations, and roundups

• The odd piece of flash fiction

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