We’ve all heard it 100 times by now: If we aren’t using AI in our businesses, we’re behind.
But in my industry—I’m a published novelist and memoirist who teaches people to write books—AI is very much viewed as a threat. Over the past year, my clients have repeatedly raised questions like:
- Am I allowed to use AI to help me write?
- Are books going to become obsolete?
And my favorite:
- Are writers going to become obsolete?
On the contrary, I think that the growth of AI-generated content is making human-written content more valuable than ever—not less.
AI is a game changer for clever marketing copy
We all know what marketing speak sounds like—it’s slick and clever and concise. It’s “finger lickin’ good” and “taste the rainbow” and “got milk?”
When it comes to generating this kind of copy very quickly, AI is a game changer. It’s 1,000 times faster than the wittiest marketing copywriter, and arguably as good. I’ve certainly used it for quippy witticisms to slap onto Meta ad graphics or email subject lines; it’s part of why I pay $20 a month for a Claude.ai premium plan.
But clever marketing copy has limited use in industries like mine where human connection is paramount.
When writers find me and my program, they don’t sign up because it’s packaged in puns and clever phrases. And they don’t sign up because AI has written grammatically impeccable marketing copy describing my services. Clients sign up because they connected with someone, a person: either with me, through my YouTube channel or podcast, or with one of my team members over the phone. I know this because they tell us in surveys.
Humans still want to read stuff written by humans
But you don’t need to be a professional writer to pick up on the difference between “person wrote this” and “machine wrote this.” If you are skeptical, just visit any Reddit forum; Reddit is full of human-authored content. It’s messy. It’s scattered. People go on tangents, they get sassy, and they write things they then regret and try to back pedal. The content you will find on Reddit is night-and-day different from content AI spits out, because AI doesn’t have bad days. It doesn’t have days at all!
There’s a reason Reddit reports 91 million active users every day. We want to hear from other humans; we especially want to hear from them if we’re buying a car or deciding where to eat on vacation, i.e. how to spend our money.
This is why AI-generated writing has made writing that feels genuinely human more special—because it is, literally. Purely human-authored content is becoming scarcer by the day. In a world of lab-grown gemstones, human writing is a natural emerald, and people pick up on that energy. It’s a vibe.
Whether you’re writing a company newsletter, ad copy, or a direct client solicitation, crafting the sentences yourself—like you would have in 2003 or 2023—doesn’t make you “behind the curve.” It makes you someone who understands that we are in a Gold Rush, and all that glitters is not gold. Just because something is faster and shinier doesn’t mean it gets results. If the end game is client acquisition, the way to get there isn’t to try to skip the part where you show up as a person with a beating heart.
Lean into your human writing skills
My advice: Lean into what makes human writing so very human. Be vulnerable and experimental. Say weird stuff that generative AI is unlikely to spit out. Because we’re all inundated right now with the same repurposed, algorithmic copy that feels soulless because it is.
That means hearing from a fellow flawed, less-than-clever Homo sapiens is—dare I say it—refreshing.
But couldn’t I just train AI to write more like a human? You could, but I wouldn’t go this route for two reasons.
- It’s more efficient just to write it yourself.
As a professional writer, I’ve done extensive experimentation to see if I can train the most capable, premium AI software to emulate my voice, and the closest I’ve gotten is probably 70 percent and that’s after dozens of hours trying to get it to sound like me.
- Readers pick up on the robotic vibe.
It sounds woo-woo, but people pick up on a vibe. As I teach the writers in my program, the energy you put into the work is the energy the reader picks up on; you’re charting a path for the reader, emotionally. The same is true of any writing used for marketing, which is inherently meant to persuade emotionally. Want people to pick up on a robotic vibe? Use a robot.
And as Jeb Blount and Anthony Iannarino write in their book The AI Edge, we still don’t trust robots.
Marketing is about cutting through the noise. The noise right now is bot-made. Be the loud one by refusing to fall for the idea that just because AI is glossy and popular, it’s superior.
The final deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, December 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.
Mary Adkins
Source link