Over the past 3 months, I have been feeling more pressure to write with AI.

But recently, something happened that changed my mind completely.

While I was in Patagonia, I met a friend for coffee. After we spoke, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he told me. His Claude Code was running his business. Social content, emails, research.

He said he had never had so much time on his hands.

Meanwhile, I felt like I had very little. Writing was the main culprit. I’m writing a book, this newsletter, social media content, and products. I love this process, but thought perhaps my ego was blinding my judgement. So I got home, made myself a cup of tea, and pulled up his social media content.

It wasn’t bad.

Actually, it was pretty good.

But it was clear as day that it was AI-generated. Perhaps not to the average reader, but to me. And I just couldn’t feel engaged with it as a result.

His argument was that his audience couldn’t tell.

My argument is that it doesn’t make a difference.

Let me explain why.

The problem with creating with AI

AI is a fantastic productivity tool, but terrible for creativity.

Sure, it can produce more efficiently and effectively than you. Yes, you can get it to write in your voice (or at least, you can prompt it to stop using em dashes, triple tap examples, and juxtaposition). Absolutely, you can write 500 words in a matter of minutes.

But writing was never about words on the page.

It was about the emotion it created.

The point of content is to make someone feel something. Without emotion, there is no connection, no action. You are just another voice in the sea of noise. And I’ve been there, screaming into the void and getting no response.

It f**king sucks.

But AI is not the cure you are looking for.

I have posted thousands of pieces of content now. I can say this next fact without any doubt:

The best, and perhaps the only, way to make your audience care about something is to care deeply about it yourself.

Not just the topic. But the actual communicating of it. You must feel deeply about whatever you are producing if you want to produce it well—emotion seeps through into the page.

Now, I don’t know about you—but aside from a mild twinge of excitement at the idea of avoiding hard work, I don’t feel shit when I write with AI.

Instead, I feel mechanical. And, a mechanical process gets a mechanical result. People might read, but they won’t really care. Because you didn’t.

Like poet Robert Frost once said:

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

I’m not suggesting you need to weep every time you write.

But damn, you need to feel something. Joy. Curiosity. Love. Anger. Frustration. Envy. You need to sit behind the computer and let this sh*t flow out of you.

Not into a prompt that strips all humanity away in place of a perfectly packaged piece. But out of your fingertips onto the page, so that the reader can pick up how you truly feel. And hopefully, feel the same.

Sure, we might not be able to tell the difference between AI writing and human writing on the surface level. But we are not idiots. We have spent hundreds of thousands of years communicating through emotion. That doesn’t disappear in the AI-age.

In fact, it only becomes more important.

Because what do you think your audience wants after they’ve spent all day speaking to a robot?

Contact with a human.

Content that reflects the raw reality of life, not an imitation of it. The real McCoy, the real you. With your rough edges, and weird way of writing and occasional spelling mistakes.

Yes, I am asking you to do a hard thing when I say write yourself.

But hard is why it is good. The crowd takes the path of least resistance. And the crowd is a terrible place to be. Average is a digital death sentence, and AI-generated writing is the pinnacle of average communication.

Use AI to buy back your time.

Use that time to write something meaningful.

Hope this helps,

Kieran