The Accidental Luxury of Sounding Like a Human

It's another nameless day of the week in the boardroom of a digital marketing agency in 2024. Everything is going along as it should—the account managers grossly inflating numbers, the creative team struggling to deliver on them. 

AI generated image for SEO purposes

The director of content had exactly the kind of idea you'd expect from someone wearing aggressively orange, thick-rimmed glasses that had never met an optometrist. "How about we get rid of the writers and invest in AI?" 

The CFO, not content with saving a pittance by booking international flights with 17-hour layovers for their employees, immediately perks up. 

The CMO, already drafting a LinkedIn post about how her 2-week paid vacation in Bora Bora helped her get in touch with her inner employee, looks up smiling widely. "Lovvvvvve itttttttt!" she exclaims, putting her precious post into drafts before googling what AI actually is.

The CEO, who's switching between cameras in the HR room for better angles of the new pretty secretary he just hired, flashes the thumbs up without even looking up from his phone. 

Decisions are made, LinkedIn posts are on the way, writers get emails, AI gets integrated.

For a good while, it seemed like a stroke of genius. The C-suite, quite averse to patting themselves on the back, gave themselves a raise. And why not, they single-boardroom-edly cut down "expenses" by about 70% while 10x-ing productivity. 

Champagne flutes clink, Ferraris roar, the secretary's contract is mysteriously upgraded.

But numbers have a habit of catching up with you, even at hypercar speeds. 

Reds flash all over client dashboards. Sounds of panicked landlines drown out the CEO's self-curated binaural productivity playlist piped through every speaker on the floor. Longstanding accounts fall like dominoes. The agency's own website engagement is in freefall. 

Shockingly, a hurriedly put-together AI-written article, "Why We Fired Our Writers and Never Looked Back—A CMO's Journey", did absolutely nothing to help.

Flutes clink in garage-sale cardboard boxes, cars get repossessed mid-lease, a secretary files a harassment suit, an ex-CMO posts "5 Things Bali Taught Me About Letting Go."

Obviously, the aforementioned agency is fictional. Partially to protect the guilty, but more because the real ones were somehow worse.

The Content Gold Rush (And How We Muddied the River)

From an insulated, free-from-reality POV that the C-suite generally operates in, AI-generated content makes sense. It must've felt like striking gold. Why pay a writer to agonize over headlines for half a day, when a free version of ChatGPT could spit 15 of them in a second and a half? 

Brands went feral, posting huge walls of AI-generated text on their blog sections and socials written by nobody for nobody, about nothing. 

With AI, experts foretold that the internet would get smarter, but instead, it just got louder. As cliché as it sounds, the focus was on making more content rather than making it better, or, judging by today's standards, readable for more than 2 minutes. 

It's all wrapped in words that are grammatically correct and structured well enough to fool you for exactly one paragraph before the emptiness sets in.

The Ken in the Room

Have you ever read a blog post that felt like a Ryan Gosling movie (except Drive and Blade Runner, but my point stands)? Glossy, watchable, and completely forgettable the moment you close the tab? 

It's smooth, confident, looks great, but is about as emotionally present as a terms and conditions page. That is how AI content reads without writers to rewrite the whole damn thing anyway guide it. 

And brands, let's not pretend. I know you're using AI. 

Every time one of your articles opens with "In today's fast-paced digital landscape", my eyes are rolling back in my head so hard I see back in the past to the exact moment I should've opted to study better so I could've ended up in Mountain View rather than Naukri View. See? Human content. 

The best description I've heard from my peers about AI content is that it feels like it was written by something that has heard of humans but hasn't met one. That is in equal parts blasé and spine-chilling in a weird way that I've never experienced before. 

When Everything Sounds the Same

…nothing ever stands out. Every brand has a "story", and the CEO has "insights" that seem hopelessly out of touch with reality. Every industry report has the same three trends written in the same three ways. The result is a bizarre kind of white noise—where you can scroll through an entire feed of content and retain absolutely nothing, like walking through an airport and forgetting you were ever there.

What cuts through now? An actual point of view. A voice that sounds like a person made choices—about what to include, what to leave out. Originality, once a nice-to-have, is now so rare that it reads as radical. 

The harder question is how to actually do it.

So What Does It Actually Look Like?

It looks like a piece that could only have been written by one specific person, not a demographic.

It references something real—an experience, a failure, a conversation that actually happened. A hill to die on, for the right or wrong reasons. It makes a joke that doesn't land perfectly (source: me), but at least tries. It has an opinion that might lose someone in the comments, and it doesn't seem to mind. 

No AI will ever understand how I straddle the line between being unbelievably smug and strangely compelling.

Human Content Is the New Luxury—And Nobody Saw It Coming

It's never pretty when an agency fails, even though writers were affected by it. To be fair, I'm not saying AI is useless, far from it. 

That generic 500-word SEO blog saying nothing to no one, I don't want to be writing that. Nobody wants to be writing that. Or the social media post starting with "Excited to share…" and followed by 5-word sentences and plenty of rocket emojis, yep, AI can have all of that.

Honestly, that kind of content is not what writers with my experience focus on anyway. It makes little difference to us, except for the fact that it makes what we do a lot more valuable. 

What I'm worried about is how management is using AI to replace writers, thinking they are the same. They are not. 

Voice-led writing is genuinely hard to replicate on AI. I know because I've tried using it as a shortcut myself, and I'm the one it's supposed to be imitating. Not everyone needs it, but the ones who do are finding out fast.

My clients still focus on human-created content (this is a phrase I thought I'd never use in my lifetime, but here we are) for their long-form articles. In fact, they make me put my articles through AI detectors to verify, which are broken themselves. 

We spent two years trying to remove the human from content creation, and the result is that we're back to "humanizing " content in 2026.

The irony is magnificent, really. Delicious, even. 

It's never pretty when an agency fails, even when you're one of the writers who saw it coming. But two positives came out of it—one, writers have more work now. 

And more importantly, two, really cheap champagne flutes.

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Have a content problem that a robot made worse? The solution might just be a human—me. I've written for brands across industries—taking the time to actually understand what they want to say and who they want to say it to.

Get through to me on WhatsApp or send me an email karanhdass on Google Mail