Not so long ago, on any given weekend, I got the urge to share my marketing thoughts in my intermittent newsletter. I got very excited about an idea and spent hours researching, drafting, deleting, and reading out loud. English is not my first language, so I relied a lot on Grammarly to help me spot mistakes. I thought using a tool that fixed my typos and suggested a different structure to my sentence was kind of cheating. If only I knew what was coming.
Chatgpt changed this. I started drafting my own articles and then telling Ai to make them “better”. My team, who is always complaining that I don’t publish enough content, started helping me write articles (written by Chatgpt) so I could review and edit to make them “less AI”. Remove the em dash, remove the “Not this, but this” formula, no emojis please. Writing became a commodity, and it almost felt lazy not to publish a blog entry every day. Guess what? I didn't. There’s something about putting generic content out there that makes me feel as if I’m throwing garbage in a coral reef.
As I read my newsletter entries before and after AI, I can clearly see the difference. AI content lacks soul, personality, and it creates stories that feel boring, generic, and don’t connect. In most cases, the value is there; there’s data, facts, useful information, even a solid point of view; but the human connection is missing, and the cringe is real.
Visiting one of my clients last week, she asked me. Do you still have copywriters at your agency? She was impressed when I answered yes. Don’t get me wrong. We are a very AI-forward team. I run out of Claude credits almost every day. I have skills, agents, and more Claude projects than hours in a day. We vibe code and are having long, intense conversations on how to implement Agentic AI not only to improve our productivity but to transform our business and the value we give to clients. But we are very conscious about our creative output.
AI is feeding itself from what’s already been written. It creates patterns of the norm. So the flyer from a school activity is the same as the bakery menu, my friend’s party invitation looks exactly like my colleague's book launch invite, and LinkedIn feels like Groundhog Day.
Last week a client gave me graphic references from brands to use as inspiration. I asked him if he knew they were all AI-generated. He told me that's what his competition was doing, so that was probably what people wanted. If AI-generated content is the benchmark, when will we see or read something new? Something different? Something that makes us stop, think, smile?
AI is also creating an overflow of content. Noise. Instagram carousels with Claude looking phrases, over polished product animations, and don’t get me started with trends such as yourself in the 80s. After Ai content started populating my social feeds, I started reading again. My dopamine addicted brain is getting tired of the ai generated infinite scroll. A silver lining I realized while writing this post.
Creative strategies, copywriting, and design are crucial in marketing. Good content needs taste, judgment, innovation, cultural relevancy, and context.
Having a real voice is the only way to stand out as a brand or thought leader. Human connection is key for attention. We need new ideas, different angles, hard questions, personal stories. We need semicolons, different paragraph lengths, and less buzzwords. We need unexpected font sizes, crazy color combinations that somehow work, and hand-drawn illustrations. We need fresh output so marketing becomes less robotic and the world becomes less boring. Hopefully, the algorithm and the consumers will reward it.
PS: I wrote this post without using AI. I spent more than two hours on it, maybe three. As I read the final draft, it feels unstructured, and I can spot the rambling. But writing it felt cathartic, and I will post it without feeling guilty about contributing to the noise.
