What AI Can’t Write and Why It Matters

AI is incredible. Oh yes, I definitely use it. It’s revolutionised how I research and prepare to write something, and it’s incredible for coming up with new ideas for my own content that hadn’t occurred to me. It’s a tremendously powerful tool and you’d be mad not to use it for your business in some form.

But I the one thing I would absolutely never, no way, ever do is copy-paste-publish (C-P-P) what it produces (and not just because some of the facts can occasionally be a bit dodgy). It’s because the reams of copy it can churn out is missing a vital essence – me. And that is the whole point of putting your words out there.

When you write for your business – blog, email marketing, social media – you’re trying to connect and communicate with other decision-making humans, who base those decisions on feeling a connection with other humans. If there’s no human in your words, there’ll be no connection.

That missing essence is becoming more and more obvious to readers of the many social media posts, blogs, and marketing emails that have had a little AI help in their creation. The effect of this can range from a knowing inner smile from the reader (“ah, I see someone’s been at the ChatGPT”), to outright annoyance that they’re being made to consume yet more generic, generated text – and they scroll on by to the next thing, maybe even with a trace of that annoyance lingering when they next encounter that business.

And isn’t that a horrifying thought? You’ve put time and effort into creating your marketing plan, and the outcome isn’t someone seeing the value in what you have to offer – it’s irritation, a turn-off, and the exact opposite of what you wanted to achieve.

AI is brilliant – but it doesn’t do everything right. It doesn’t do You, and the more people read AI content, the more they’re seeing not what’s in there, but what isn’t. So here’s what I’ve noticed AI struggling with, and what you can do about that.

 

What AI Can’t Write (for now)

There’s no nuance. AI can produce the ‘facts’ it finds elsewhere on the internet, but it is much more difficult for it to interpret those to make a point in the way that you can. There’s no colour to what it writes: no personal experience, opinion, or insight into the subject – it presents a summary of what it’s found, and possibly a thin conclusion based on that broad overview. It’s incapable of adding your context, nuance, expertise and unique perspective.

It risks repeating itself. AI pads its copy out to meet a word count. If you ask it to create a blog post of 800 words on a certain topic, and it can’t really find that much to fill it with, it will just repeat the same point in the next paragraph, but phrased slightly differently. Encounter it, and that sense of deja-vu will make your brain go, “Hang on – didn’t I just read that, with other words?” – and that can make you feel like you’re wasting your precious reading time on not much substance.

There are so many little style tells that give the presence of AI away as well – I covered some of these in a recent edition of my Content Cracked email. Ridiculous quantities of emojis, that weird long dash that no human ever bothers to use, and the well-worn opening phrase: “In the fast-paced world of…”. Add a few of these to the previous two points and you can be pretty sure you’re reading a C-P-P job.

 

Adding the Missing Ingredient

Absolutely you should use AI. Like I said before, you’d be mad not to. But my golden rule is this: never, ever be a C-P-P-er.

Read the AI copy through and make an effort to change it. Really read it for those unnecessarily-repeated ideas, and get rid of them. Take out the multitude of emojis, the dividing lines that separate paragraphs, and the weird long dashes. And for goodness’ sake, rewrite anything that you wouldn’t normally write – make it sound like something you’d say if you were writing from scratch, or speaking to someone over a coffee. Infuse that missing essence into it – You.

You are the secret, magic ingredient to your content’s success, and you have simply got to be there for it to do the job you want it to.

And here’s another little tip. The perfectionist in me used to recoil in horror at a typo in my work – but now I don’t sweat it nearly as much as I used to. Because actually, that little imperfection is the mark of human fingerprints on that writing, and not AI’s. So maybe a couple of small spelling mistakes, or a stray apostrophe might just work in your favour every now and then…

 

Final Thoughts (Mine, Not AI’s)

“Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human intelligence; it is a tool to amplify human creativity and ingenuity.”

That’s from Professor Fei-Fei Li, of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and it’s how I think of it whenever I enter a query into ChatGPT. It’s there to help, not do the whole job for you – because the job’s not done until it sounds like something you’d write.

AI is improving all the time, and no doubt the day will come when it can produce your content just as if it’s come out through your fingers on the keyboard. But until that day, please, please add that magic ingredient, or you risk your readers just scrolling on to search for human connection elsewhere.

 

I know it’s not always as easy as that, especially if you’ve always believed that writing isn’t one of your strengths. That’s where my Writing Room can help. Come and join my online workspace. And because you’ve made it all the way to the end of my blog, making you one of my favourite readers, you can learn this little piece of news out before I splash it about on social media…you can now Pay As You Go! It’s just £22 for a one-off visit to a Writing Room of your choice, and you don’t have to sign up to be a full Writing Club member if that’s not right for you just now. Find out more and buy your one-time Writing Room pass here: https://rlcwords.co.uk/product/writing-room-pay-as-you-go/