AI has its uses.
Let’s get that out of the way early, before anyone sharpens a pitchfork. AI is perfectly adequate for very basic copy in commercial contexts only. LinkedIn updates. Mail-outs. The sort of necessary corporate copy that nobody really wants to write and nobody, if they’re honest, really wants to read.
If AI wants to do that work, then frankly, good luck to it. I will happily step aside while a machine announces that someone is “delighted to share some exciting news” or “thrilled to be attending” a conference they will immediately forget about.
But there is a problem, and it’s a growing one.
We are already drowning in samey, misfiring, obviously AI-generated text. You can feel it instantly, just as you can detect the cringeworthy grind of AI voiceovers on YouTube. Just as you are instantly turned away by stock photography, corporate jargon, and those terrifyingly upbeat brand videos where everyone speaks like they are in a hostage video.
Something about it says: you didn’t care enough to show up.
And that matters, because writing — real writing — is not a cosmetic exercise. It is not just information transfer. It has presence. Distinct, individual and human presence.
AI, however, has never experienced what it writes about.
It has never been in love. It has never drunk coffee. It has never woken up at three in the morning convinced it’s made a catastrophic mistake. It has never taken a risk and lived with the consequences. It has never felt that peculiar mixture of hope and dread that comes with trying something new. It has never had anything to lose.
And because it has never done any of these things, it cannot mean what it says.
It can approximate. It can imitate. It can rearrange patterns of language scraped from the texts of people who have lived. But it cannot stand behind a sentence and say, “This is what I learned. This is why I share.”
That’s the difference.
When you read something written by a human being, especially something imperfect, you are reading an imagination at work. In your reading you can discern the traces of decisions, versions, hesitations, risks, sometimes even mistakes that turn out, in retrospect, to be strangely beautiful or wonderfully apt.
Some of the best sentences I’ve ever written felt wrong at first. Too jagged. Too odd. Too abstract. They survived not because they were fluent, but because they were true. They carried the grain of experience inside them.
AI does not do grain. It does polish.
And polish, on its own, is deeply boring.
When the film director Alex Cox was asked about his favourite moments in cinema, he mentioned a moment in the original 1939 King Kong. There’s a scene on Skull Island where Kong fights a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Before the monster bust-up kicks off, Kong pauses to hide Fay Wray, the actress, in a tree. Having nothing to do, the T-Rex pauses and scratches its head.
It’s a tiny, unnecessary gesture. It doesn’t advance the plot. It doesn’t make the scene more “efficient.” But it reveals something extraordinary: the presence of the puppeteer behind the monster. A persona leaks through. Humanity asserts itself.
That moment is why the scene still works, has charisma, charm.
Now compare that to modern CGI dinosaurs. They are technically astonishing. Perfectly rendered. Anatomically precise. And completely without personality. They don’t scratch their heads. They don’t surprise us. They don’t reveal the person behind them, because there isn’t one.
AI is like a T-Rex that can’t scratch its own head.
It can roar. It can stomp. It can fill the screen. But it cannot do the small, human, unnecessary thing that makes us lean forward and think, Ah. Someone is here. I can feel them.
This is why you should not be using AI for the texts where you lay down your core beliefs, where you present your appeal.
Your book. Your manifesto. Your origin story. Your explanation of why your business exists and why it deserves to continue existing. These are not administrative documents. They are philosophical ones. They are moral ones.
They are, whether you like it or not, confessions.
And confessions require a confessor.
There is another, more subtle danger with AI-generated writing, which is that it encourages a particular kind of cowardice. It allows people to hide behind mere adequacy and the average. To settle for “good enough.” To outsource not just the labour of writing, but the responsibility of thinking for oneself.
Voltaire said that the perfect is the enemy of the good. But in this context, the good is the enemy of the best when you need and deserve the best. And AI is just-about OK at producing the good. It will give you something passable. Something unobjectionable. Something that nobody will actively complain about. Something that anyone could have come up with in the same short time frame you allotted to it.
It will also give you something nobody will remember.
Writing that matters takes risks. It suggests taste, values and priorities. It provokes a reaction. It has fingerprints.
AI leaves no fingerprints. Only smudges.
When people tell me that AI copy is “good enough,” what they usually mean is that it is safe enough. It won’t offend. It won’t expose them. It won’t force them to commit too clearly to anything.
But if you are running a business, or building a brand, or trying to articulate a vision, safety is not your friend. Clarity is. Distinction is. Voice is.
And an algorithms cannot create a voice.
Voice emerges from living. From paying attention. From making mistakes, growth and learning. From having opinions you’re prepared to stand behind, even when they’re unfashionable or awkward.
A machine cannot do that for you.
This is not an argument against technology. I am not nostalgic for quills. I am arguing for proportion and placement. Tools should be used where tools belong. And AI is a tool, not a witness.
When you ask it to write about courage, it has never been afraid.
When you ask it to write about failure, it has never lost anything.
When you ask it to write about ambition, it has never wanted anything.
It can tell you what ambition sounds like, but not what it costs.
And cost is where meaning lives.
So yes, use AI for the dull stuff. Let it take the minutes. The updates. The filler. Let it handle the administrative noise of modern life. Use it as an abruptly-promoted grammar checker, nothing more.
But when it comes to the texts that define you — the ones that explain why you do what you do, and why anyone should care — show up yourself. Or, if you don’t have the time, the skill, or the inclination, work with another human being who will.
Because at the heart of every piece of writing that lasts, there is a T-Rex scratching its head in the middle of the fight. Doing something unnecessary. Risky. Slightly odd.
And that, inconveniently, is the point.
This article is written by Ashley Stokes, Lead Writer at The Ghosting Company, and is inspired directly by the conversation featured in “Turn Your Business Narrative Into an Unforgettable Story With a Ghostwriter”
