AI Can Write Effective Marketing, But It’s Essential That It Doesn’t

Next week, I head on a writing retreat in the Costa Rican jungle, focused on uncensoring ourselves, saying what we really want to say and letting expression be what it is supposed to be: expressive.

And it’s an activation I feel like has already well and truly kicked off.

Because it’s become glaringly obvious that I’m censoring the fuck out of myself when it comes to a particular topic, the robots.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know I’ve written my fair share on this topic. I’ve spoken about how I’ve lost clients to it, how it strips our expression and takes the feeling out of marketing.

But it’s all been very surface, when I, a Scorpio Stellium, was made to dive into the deepest depths that I know many people would rather not be pulled into.

I’ve reached the point where I can’t dance around the depths any longer, though.

Last year, I almost quit marketing when I didn’t just lose some clients to AI, but also started seeing the words I’d poured myself into, whenever I felt the spark ignite (which was often), show up in my inbox once again.

Only this time, they weren’t really mine.

The robots had repurposed what I’d written and, in doing so, stripped the very aliveness out of them.

And you know what? That wasn’t even what tripped me up.

It was that they actually sounded better than I did.

They were far more concise, clear and seamless in paving a path to conversion.

Which, in the eyes of the corporate world, is exactly what “good” marketing should do.

And so, the only conclusion I could come to in that moment was that I was shit at it and I may as well quit with the last drop of dignity I had left.

So I started to do that.

I spent my time on Indeed looking for jobs, opened tabs for interior design courses to train in something different and even considered moving to a tiny remote island to teach yoga (this one does still appeal tbh).

But every time I tried to take a step in a different direction, I felt even more defeated.

The idea that I wouldn’t spend my days turning moments into marketing, pouring words onto a page and riffing on the kind of topics that would actually make a difference to the world ate me up inside.

Marketing was all I had ever wanted to do and I felt like it hadn’t just been robbed from me, but the industry it resided in had chewed me up and spat me out.

Except, it hadn’t at all.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but marketing was actually calling me louder than ever before.

Because the truth is, marketing had been misaligned way before robots got a grip on it. It had lost its core, its expression, its purpose, its power, its artful nature. That happened before ChatGPT became the top tab in every marketer's browser.

And it’s only now that I’m seeing how necessary its infiltration really is.

Robots are revolutionary.

Not just because they are streamlining, simplifying, strategising… yada yada yada.

But because they are returning us to things that aren’t a revolution at all.

The whispers of “the return of analogue” are everywhere you look and I truly believe we have AI to thank for that.

Because who wants to read robotic words?

Who wants to scroll social media when we have no idea if what we are looking at is real (no mum, that Zorb ball bouncing through central London with people in it didn’t actually happen)?

Who wants to share content that we didn't even write or really remember, that isn't truly ours to even share?

I know I don't.

Words hold frequency.

There is an energetic signature behind what we are putting out into the world and when I’m reading something and my energy drains, that’s how I know I can’t fully see the creator behind it.

It starts to feel familiar, like I’ve read it somewhere before.

That’s what I’m seeing more and more.

AI is meeting people at a point where it feels easier to put something out that isn’t fully theirs, because if it doesn’t land, if it doesn’t work, if people don’t like it, there’s a cushion there.

It wasn’t really you anyway.

But I’ve spent years healing the parts of me that felt like my voice wasn’t enough, that it needed to be clearer, better, more strategic, more polished to be worthy of being seen.

And I don’t believe bypassing the process of creating does us any favours.

Art doesn’t work like that.

Sometimes writing takes months.

Sometimes it starts and stops.

Sometimes it’s messy, uncomfortable and hard to finish.

And that process is the point.

For us. For the people reading it. If we take that away we take away the very stories that people find their deepest resonance in. We rob them of the ability to see themselves within our lived experience. We simplify the depth that the truest experiences reside in.

Ironically, speaking on robots stripping our creativity actually makes me very creative.

So I’ve ranted and raved about it in this Podcast episode and poured my heart into one of my favourite Substacks yet…

No AI in sight 😉