Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones once said the best piece of advice he could give for playing guitar is: play with feeling.
The same is the case for writing. And in the age of AI this matters, a lot.
A case in point. The author F. Scott Fitzgerald once challenged his contemporary Ernest Hemingway to write a six word story, Hemingway’s response: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
That is great writing. Now a machine can undertake that challenge but the results are artificial and not based on personal experience.
our articles should always be written by a person having interviewed the client
And this is where there will always be a place for great writing in business. AI is not sentient. It does not feel and as a result you cannot surrender passion, humour, judgement or empathy to a machine.
Right now AI copy remains largely synthetic. From what I have seen AI press releases are unfit for purpose in format, tone, accuracy and content or all of the above. Newsrooms are apparently drowning in this AI dross. That is why we have a policy at my company Polaris Media that our articles should always be written by a person having interviewed the client.
This is not to be luddite. AI clearly excels at research, ideas and summaries but our commitment to clients is not to sacrifice human oversight. Always invest passion and client understanding into the writing that matters. That is the gold standard we aspire to at Polaris.
Just listen to Exile on Main Street or read the Great Gatsby.