Improve your company’s communications … by writing like a human.

For the last couple of years we have been witnessing the encroachment of AI-generated writing across almost all spheres of communication. Actual human writers are in danger of quickly becoming an endangered species.

In academia, an arms race is taking place between AI text editing engines that purport to make AI-generated text “sound human,” and AI engines that do the opposite, enabling educators to determine whether a submitted paper or assignment was created using generative AI. In television, print and online newsrooms and editorial departments, journalists and writing staff are being downsized, replaced by AI-generated news reports and articles. Corporate communications departments now regularly use AI to compose press releases, create content for social media, and crank out annual reports. AI can now write your novel, compose and play your "original" song, improve your profile photo, and even generate your “pitch” on dating sites.

A growing side effect of AI’s capacity to easily and rapidly produce content on almost any topic is that even authentic human-generated content, if written in the dry, fact-laden and impersonal style heretofore the norm for corporate communications, consultancy reports and marketing materials, can appear to have been the result of an AI prompt. It thus loses impact, and may even be counter-productive, as the reader of that content will perceive it as yet another brick in the depersonalized, dehumanized wall separating companies from consumers, vendors from clients, the media from viewers and readers, and political parties from voters.

To avoid creating this erroneous yet nonetheless damaging perception, human writers must, in a way, outsmart the AI engines by writing in ways that AI finds hard to emulate because the source material for it is not typically included in the mass of content used to train AI. This includes:

Humor. AI may have many wonderful capabilities, but the use of irony, using clever similes or metaphors, telling funny stories, using puns, or relating something to the punchline of a widely known joke are not among them. Just as in interpersonal relationships, humor makes communication relatable. It thus reinforces the “human” nature of the communication that uses it to get a point across, to educate, or to inform.

Make it personal. Human writers have a unique ability to create a ?“connection” with their target audience by describing things that happened to them or that they have experienced, relating these – and how these events made them feel at the time – to the point they are trying to get across. I suppose that ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude might one day be able to insert, into text they are asked to generate, amusing episodes about the early days of their being programmed and trained. But somehow I don’t think that will produce the kind of human connection I’m talking about here.

Cultural References. Relating, say, a failed product launch to the sinking of the Titanic, or an aggressive corporate tax audit to “The Eye of Sauron,” can create a vivid image for readers far more powerful and instantaneously understandable than a more prosaic description or analysis of a situation. Cultural references can act as a powerful societal “glue” bonding the writer to the reader, creating a sense that they are operating from the same shared cultural context. Drawing parallels of this sort is beyond the scope of what AI engines have been trained to do, thus endowing communication using cultural references with more of a recognizable “human touch.”

Asking questions. AI engines are trained to take in a prompt and spit out an appropriate factual response or summary. What they are not trained to do is to take the premise of a situation and turn it into an open-ended set of hypothetical extensions of that situation, or, even further, into thought-provoking questions related to the situation relating to, say, ethics or philosophy. Asking questions such as ?“Would you hire someone with a criminal record if you thought that person was highly competent?” or “Would investors benefit if we downplayed the importance of quarterly earnings reports in favor of indicators of longer-term strategy success?” move the communication, in the mind of the reader, from one-way, top-down information to more of a dialogue, thus promoting a closer connection with the company or person doing the communicating.

These are just a few ways in which human writing for business purposes can better distinguish itself from the AI-generated variety. This may only work for a while, as AI will no doubt continue to expand its scope of source material and, well, “intelligence.” But for the meantime, “not sounding like a robot” surely must start to enter and move up the ranks of corporate communications and marketing best practices.

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