I was recently onboarding with a new client, revisiting brand objectives and setting goals for the next quarter. Like many companies, they’re investigating the possibility of building a proprietary AI tool for use with their customers–and the founder quipped (without pausing for breath), “not for writing, Sharon” and kept moving.
I’m not mad about it.
I am, in fact, glad to have firmly established a reputation as the person in the room most likely to ask questions about how AI is being employed for the purposes of writing. Since AI is fundamentally impersonal, I’m always going to push back on its common use as a writing generator–and I don’t foresee that changing even given its rapid development pace, since it’s not likely to grow a personality.
I don’t want to read, and your customers don’t want to read, something that you haven’t bothered to write. In the sea of text that is the internet, why should I devote minutes of my day consuming something with no voice of its own, that doesn’t work to connect with me on an emotional level, and that–at best–can only give me information that may or may not be reliable?
If you’re tempted to use AI to write for you, please don’t. Remember your goals: however you’ve framed it more specifically, we write in business to connect with our customers. If you ask AI to write for you, it’ll be the one making a connection (though I maintain that’s not really possible, given its lack of perspective). AI can be incredibly useful to help us get past the blank page, to bounce some ideas around, even to make some organization suggestions. But it can’t, and shouldn’t, write for us.
Something Polished 