The Most Dangerous Thing AI Might Replace

I love the art of writing and I also love how technology changes that art.

Which makes this particular moment in time quite staggering. It would be foolish of me to sit here and tell you that AI can’t output a decent article. I think it can. I think there are multiple instances, in particular when it comes to non-fiction and business content, where I couldn’t tell you whether something was written by AI or not (and I enjoyed the read). Maybe that says something about the quality of content or maybe that just says something about what’s shifted over the past 20 years. It’s important to remember that a lot of the content we read wasn’t just written to capture reader’s attention. Often it was written to capture SEO spiders and algorithms. I think this is why the quality of output from generative AI tools is so staggering to so many. It’s good enough to fool us but not great enough to inspire us. And maybe that’s because most business content was never trying to inspire anyone in the first place. It was trying to rank. It was trying to perform. It was trying to satisfy a system. I hold business writing to a higher standard. I want it to push me and pull me and inspire me. I don’t just want it to be good enough for search engines.

Do you think we’re paying attention to the wrong thing here?

This week I published a conversation with Carmine Gallo (also author of the book, Talk Like TED and many others) for Thinking With Mitch Joel. Carmine has spent years studying and training world-class communicators and most recently he published an original audio project, Viral Voices – From TED Talks To TikTok, Persuasive Communication Skills For The Digital Age. And what you realize if you listen to the audiobook or spend time with our conversation is that what often looks effortless is almost always the result of deep and concentrated practice. And in that work is where experience and results are cultivated. People come up to me after a keynote presentation and tell me that they themselves should be up there or that they can do what I just did on stage… it used to ruffle my feathers. Perhaps it’s age, perhaps it’s maturity, but more recently when that happens my only thought is that I must make this look so easy to do… because it certainly wasn’t easy to get to this point. I’m not trying to inflate my own tires. I just know that anything that looks easy often takes so much effort to get there. Don’t believe me? Go and watch how so many magic tricks are revealed on Instagram and then tell me if you have any shot ever performing the exact same trick in a way that would fool others.

Does that mean a lot of talent isn’t genetic or some type of mysterious gift?

When we’re exposed to greatness, it’s easy to assume we’re looking at something innate, but that doesn’t preclude the everyday person from putting in the reps to get to a point of mastery or a higher level of competence. So while it might be a mysterious gift for some, practice and the repetitions nobody sees is more often the answer for success. Writing might be a tougher hill to climb but I believe that the practice is the work in this case, not the output. It’s the drafts that never get published or those keynote presentations that get rehearsed over and over again until it looks natural to an audience.

The conversation about AI and content has become too strangely fixated on output.

Can it write the article? Yes. Create the presentation? Yes. Generate the report? Yes. Produce the video? Yes (kinda). But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if we’re paying attention to the wrong thing. Because AI can now generate something that looks remarkably close to finished work and because, in many cases, it’s better than what most people would have produced on their own, we spend a lot of time debating whether that’s good or bad (or ethical)… but I’m not sure that’s the most important question. The more beautiful question might be: what happens when we remove some of the struggle that used to sit between having an idea and publishing it? For most of my career, writing wasn’t just how I communicated ideas… it was how I discovered them. A blank page has a funny way of exposing weak thinking. You start with one belief and end up somewhere completely different. You realize the argument isn’t as strong as you thought it was. You uncover a personal contradiction. You find a connection you didn’t see before. The work wasn’t simply producing words based on a theme (or prompt). The work was figuring out what you actually believed and how you learned… and what might move a reader to be moved as well. The article wasn’t the output. The article was the evidence that the thinking had happened.

Practice is frustrating.

Just ask any musician (I’ve been there too… and there’s a reason I no longer play the electric bass… and it wasn’t the live gigs or the hangs). Athletes don’t love drills… speakers don’t love rehearsals (do you know how awkward it is to pretend like you’re speaking to an audience in front of a hotel mirror while you talk in a performative way out loud to your carry-on)? But the repetition isn’t separate from the craft. The repetition is the craft. It’s where judgment gets built… the taste gets refined and as you output that, it’s where instinct develops.

And that’s the part I worry we don’t talk about enough.

The strange thing about AI-generated content is that much of it is actually pretty good. Better than good, in many cases. That’s precisely why this conversation matters. That’s why so many people are impressed by it. But “pretty good” is rapidly becoming abundant. The internet is already full of SEO content that checks every box, answers every question and leaves almost no impression with emotion. AI has the potential to create a lot more of that. Not because the content is bad. Because once competence becomes abundant, competence stops being interesting. When everyone can produce something that looks like an article, the article itself becomes less valuable.

What becomes more valuable is the thinking underneath it.

Not just to the reader… but to the creator. Because the reader only sees the article… the creator gets the benefit of becoming the person capable of writing it. The ability to connect ideas in a way that feels surprising. That will never emerge from pressing a button. It emerges from spending enough time wrestling with the keys that you begin to develop your own relationship with the content… with the words.

Which brings me back to practice.

Can AI challenge those intellectual assumptions faster? Can AI do the “blue collar” text-based work of spelling… grammar… generating keywords or a better title… or how else to phrase something? Can AI actually deepen the work? Can it help you explore more possibilities? Yes… yes… and yes… but don’t confuse the practice of writing (which makes you and your audience better) with editing an AI generated article. Maybe the algorithms won’t notice… But you will quickly notice how your thinking stops thinking when you don’t have to work at it.

If AI can increasingly generate the output, where exactly is the value being created? In the words on the page… or in the person becoming capable of writing them?

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