Deciding is human

1 July 2026

AI is good at making everyone sound competent and polished. And it does it cheaply. The results is more words, but less connection and impact:

Alice Bartlett on publishing:

“Please don’t “use AI to polish” your blog posts. It makes them sound like every other blog post on the internet and therefore makes them very boring to read. I like your idiosyncratic little voice ok? Your silly little grammars. You’re the only you there is.”

Tom MacWright on hiring:

“I don’t know anything about these people. […] The perfected, generated, prompted resume is generic and impersonal. It tells me nothing about this person, other than that they use particular tools. […] if you want people to connect with you as a person, you can’t hide behind a machine. Publish your typos and show your struggle getting going. Be a human.”

So we might say that AI commoditises writing.

If you put nothing of yourself into it, the only thing you can get back is the professional average, competent and polished, but samey and a bit dull. This might be ok for some work.

But when there’s a lot of content like that, the value eventually shifts to the distinctive stuff AI can’t do: you. Writing is thinking, so even if you’re using AI to help you write, stay involved ¹. I’m not saying avoid all use of AI, I’m saying stay in the work.

This also means that there are things that you shouldn’t outsource to AI, even though its good at doing them ². Part of your work is deciding what to hand to AI and what to keep.

Writing is thinking, and deciding is human.

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1. Important disclosure!: I wrote this without the help of an AI :)↩︎

2. The counter-argument is something like: refusing to use AI eventually looks self-defeating, like insisting on living in candlelight.↩︎