AI Can Write. But Only Humans Can Mean It.

I don't think the AI takeover looks the way most people imagine it... For starters, we're a long way away from Terminator robots coming back through time to kill the mother of the human resistance... but what's more likely on people's minds right now, and you can take ten mins scrolling on LinkedIn for evidence, is that AI is taking our jobs, taking our designs, taking our writing, right our of our hands.

Before I continue, let me just say that yes, I too use AI for many things. I use it to work through design ideas, help spot things I might be too tired to spot after 27 hours of work, or to help turn a 35 min brain dump, or rant, into a list of organized thoughts that I can then use productively to move forward when stuck... and yes, with careful precision, it can create some stunning visuals that save countless hours of time or money, when I need something done right now. For this, it's fantastic for the average person who can't afford staff, or a designer, and are operating as a "one man show" until they level up their career...

But the real risk that I'm seeing, made clear just the other day, is that AI will never take over human creativity or jobs, it takes over the human's ability to think in their own. Humans ARE BECOMING the AI chat bots. A cybernetic organism, to stay on theme... we are living, breathing entities, flesh and blood, but using a machine brain to create the output.

I see it happening everywhere, especially since I've become more active on LinkedIn.

And I understand why, because I find myself falling into the same "trap", so to speak. I think to myself, this is a great direction I'm headed, but I need to expand my online presence. I need to post more articles about things that matter, but I don't have time. But unlike most people I know how to use AI better than the average person... if I just spend 30 mins "training" it to know my voice, my writing style, if I get it to ask me 20 questions about my thoughts, opinions, or anything relevant to the topic I want to write about, it will understand me...

So you do that, 45+mins later, you have a fully "trained" machine brain ready to write for you. You tell it what to write, how to sound, what tone you want, how long, how professional... it goes to work.. oh wow, it's done already.

Amazing. 5 seconds!

You read it and think "OMG, this is perfect. This is so me. This is exactly what I wanted to say..."

No shit. You just spent an hour telling it what to say. So of course that's what it's going to say. But this just sounds so much better than anything I could have written myself. I don't even need to edit it.

It gets posted.

But the thing is, everyone is doing this. Even ME!

Well, not anymore.

Why?

Because it doesn't matter how "ME" it sounds, it's not me. I know that, and that bothers me. When I browse LinkedIn, I read other articles and start thinking, wow, that sounds like me too. So does this.. so does... wait a second, everyone sounds the same. Everyone is writing like AI... the humans have become the AI chat bots, but with much more direction. They aren't randomly disrupting Twitter or Social Media, they are being controlled by humans, directing them what to say and do.

But rest assured, this doesn't signal the "end of human creativity". In fact, this very phenomenon, to me, gives me a lot of optimism.

Why?

- Humans want to take all the credit. So no matter how involved AI was in their work, they aren't saying "Here's a post I had a machine write for me, enjoy."

- When everyone starts to sound the same, the ones who write from the heart (like this post), it really shows. They stand out.

- And lastly, at the end of the day, humans want human connection.

Don't get me wrong, AI is here to stay... it ain't going anywhere, but in the end, humans will prevail. Humans want to touch and feel things. They want to smell and experience things. They want to engage and interact with real humans who understand them, not a machine that's been programmed to always agree with you. Humans have hearts and emotions and souls that long for deep connection.

A machine is only as deep as the cold metal it's made of. A tool. Not a replacement for human nature.

And this is why I will no longer have AI write my articles.

I love writing. Why am I handing that job over to a machine?

This article took me just as much time to write as it would have taken me to tell the machine what to write, and it wouldn't have sounded like my own real thoughts. And I didn't even edit it.

That's all.

Until next time...