Near the end of 2025, my biggest client announced they were putting our firm’s contract out for an open bid. I wasn’t born yesterday. I knew what that meant. Nearly a decade’s worth of work suddenly meant little because stock prices need to constantly increase, and that means people, and vendors, must make way.
As I reached the depths of this despair, I still had a contract to honor and fulfill. So, I had to write press releases for them, even if I didn’t want to. Despite vowing I never would, I gave in and used AI.
I fired up ChatGPT and pasted in my notes about the news being announced. With some simple prompts, I was ready to receive my first AI-drafted press release.
The words appeared like magic. The soul left my body, and not because the copy was good.
The resulting press release was, to put it politely, a steaming pile of manure. There were endless em-dashes – which annoyed me as a lover of punctuation! The quotes were jargon-filled nonsense. The headline and subhead made no sense. It “hallucinated” at least one government agency.
When I downloaded AI’s version, I realized it had done one thing correctly – the press release was formatted properly. Sure, the company’s name was misspelled. But the formatting? Spot on.
Remarkably, this is not what caused my crippling writer’s block. I wrote the press release from scratch and sent it off to the client. No, it was what returned that nearly removed my will to live.
The revised version included several phrases and an even one sentence that was exactly what I saw when I tried AI. No one at the company had read or edited what I wrote. They fed it to ChatGPT, or something similar, and prompted it to make edits.
What’s the point?
It has been so long since I have been able to sit down and type freely because I was shook about what AI is doing to people’s creative skills. Working in tech communications since 2015 has offered a front row seat to the brightest people I’ve ever met getting completely and thoroughly cooked by AI.
These are titans of their industry, executives who have built successful companies, and they’re all reduced to asking an AI chatbot what to do. CEOs have shown me clearly AI-generated content that “they” wrote and asked for my opinion. How do you politely tell someone their brain no longer works?
What nearly ended me is how much I love writing. I’ve always loved writing. I became a journalist because I wanted to tell stories. Yes, of course, I wanted to break news and cover what’s going on for my community. But more importantly, I wanted to share what made people interesting.
The thing that makes people most interesting is their brains. What we think, and what we do, defines us. In recent months, I’ve seen ads for AI to take everything that makes us us away from us. Let AI plan your niece’s birthday party. Let AI design your workout routine. Let AI read a story to your child. Let AI tell you how to cook something.
What happened to the joy in life that came from figuring it out? I’m writing this, and I have no idea if a single person will even read it, much less care about it. Why should I let that stop me?
The AI-Less Future
I’m tired of executives telling me I’ll be replaced by AI. I’m tired of poor writers publishing AI slop. I’m tired of entire “news” sites being comprised of AI-generated content.
I miss people. I miss human connections. I want a fellow human being to tell me my writing sucks, not AI. I want to read words that I know came from a human being, no matter how dumb or stupid those words are.
If you follow me on bluesky, you know I complain, a lot, about the state of the world. I’m not alone. The world is pretty terrible. The one thing I can do is model better behavior.
If you’ve made it this far, you should write something today. Anything. Don’t use AI. Don’t use any technology aids. Open up a blank sheet and start typing. Maybe it’ll be great. Maybe it’ll be terrible.
But it’ll be you, like how this was all me.
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