Open your LinkedIn feed. Scroll for ten seconds. Do you feel that? That’s the “Beige Era.” It’s the sound of a billion voices saying exactly what you expected them to say, in exactly the tone you expected them to use. It is polite, it is efficient, and it is utterly, soul-crushingly boring.
In November 2022, we thought the machine had finally learned to write. ChatGPT launched, and within weeks, we were all writing our Sinterklaas poems with it. Love letters. Legal documents. Business advisory reports. Email after email after email. The tool was designed to write, so write we did. And quickly, the verdict came in: copywriting was dead. The machines had won. Pack up your pens, close your Word documents, and hand the keys over to the algorithm.
We were wrong.
The machine hadn’t learned to write. The machine had simply learned how to simulate the average.
Here we are, years later, and something strange has happened. We’re drowning in content. Oceans of it. Every LinkedIn post reads the same. Every blog sounds like it was written by the same polite, slightly bland entity. Legal briefs went to court without human review. Analyst reports lacked basic fact-checking. We entered an age of infinite words, most of them non-memorable.
The death of copywriting wasn’t an execution. It was an invitation. An invitation to remember what writing actually is.
I Am Not a Luddite
Let me be clear: I am a fan of the revolution.
Generative AI is not a passing trend. It is a technology that will reshape our lives in ways we cannot yet foresee. It will transform marketing. It will transform business. It will transform how we work, how we create, how we think. Within five years, the marketing function will be radically different from what it is today. And I welcome that.
I love AI for visuals. I love AI for video. I love AI for its agentic capabilities, its reasoning power, the way agents can communicate with each other, the way it promises a personal assistant and true productivity improvements for everyone.
But here’s where I draw the line.
I do not believe that we should use generative AI to write pure, targeted pieces of content. Not blog posts. Not thought leadership. Not the words that carry your brand’s soul into the world.
And I want to tell you why.
The Confession
I’ll admit it: I’ve clicked the “Generate” button.
I’ve sat there, tired, with a deadline looming, and hoped the machine would give me the spark I lacked. And every time, the result felt like eating a meal made of ash. It was technically “food,” but it had no flavor. I realized that by using AI to bypass the struggle, I wasn’t just saving time—I was deleting my own presence from my work.
If I’m not in the words, why should you be in the audience?
This is the seduction we all face. The blank page is terrifying. The cursor blinks in accusation. And there, in the corner of our screen, sits a button that promises relief. “Let me do the hard part for you,” it whispers. “Let me fill this emptiness so you don’t have to.”
But emptiness is the point. The void is where creation lives. And every time we let the machine fill it for us, we lose something we can never get back: our fingerprints on the work.
The Lens and the Pen
Consider photography. When you pick up a camera and point it at the world, you capture what is there. You report what the lens sees. You record reality in all its dimensions—good, bad, overexposed, underexposed. If you shoot straight into the sun, you’ll get glare. If your shadows are wrong, you’ll lose detail. But what ends up on that photo is a reflection of what actually existed. It is reality as it was.
You cannot choose the color of the sky. You cannot choose the green of the leaves in the trees. You cannot dictate the color of the cars driving by or the haircuts of the people walking past. You have to accept what is in front of the camera. That is your capture. That is your visual. And if that piece is imperfect by your standards, well—that is what you have.
Now consider an AI-generated image. It must be perfect, or it fails. If AI renders a hand with six fingers, you cannot use it. Though we’ve nearly crossed this threshold: AI-generated visuals are rapidly approaching the point where such flaws vanish. Yet the principle remains: AI images are judged against a standard of photorealism. They must replicate what *could* exist.
Writing is different.
A camera is a mirror; it is a slave to the light. But a pen? A pen is a shovel. You have to dig into the dirt of your own experience to find the right word. You don’t “capture” a sentence; you *build* it, brick by bloody brick. When you use AI to write, you aren’t building—you’re ordering a pre-fab house. It’ll keep the rain out, but nobody will ever call it a masterpiece.
This is the fundamental difference between the lens and the pen.
The Sovereignty of Choice
There is no default setting for a piece of writing. There is no “what the lens sees.” There is only the terrifying freedom of deciding what to say and how to say it.
And that freedom is everything.
When I write, I choose. I choose the word “terrifying” over “intimidating.” I choose a short sentence here and a long one there. I choose to start with a provocative claim or a quiet observation. Every comma is a decision. Every paragraph break is a decision. Every turn of phrase is a decision that reflects who I am, what I believe, and what I want you to feel.
AI does not make decisions.
AI makes predictions.
It calculates the most statistically likely next word based on patterns in its training data.
But leadership isn’t about being “statistically likely.”
Leadership is about being the outlier.
AI does not choose “terrifying” because it captures something essential about the human experience of confronting a blank page. It selects “terrifying” because that word frequently appears in similar contexts in the corpus of text it has consumed.
Do you see the difference?
Marketing that predicts what a customer wants to hear is forgettable. Marketing that chooses what to say is leadership. It’s the difference between following the crowd and cutting through it. It’s the difference between noise and signal. It’s the difference between content and art.
The Suffering of Creation
The musician Nick Cave, when confronted with an AI-generated song “in the style of Nick Cave,” offered a devastating critique. He described the creative process as arising from struggle—the breathless confrontation with one’s own vulnerability. He argued that algorithms don’t feel, data doesn’t suffer, and without that suffering, there can be no shared transcendent experience.
This is not mere romanticism. This is a fundamental truth about what makes human creation valuable.
When you write—truly write—you confront yourself. You struggle with how to say what you mean. You delete and rewrite and delete again. You wrestle with the gap between what’s in your head and what appears on the screen. That struggle leaves fingerprints. Those fingerprints are what readers recognize, even if they can’t articulate why.
Cave expressed disappointment that smart people could think the artistic act is mundane enough to be replicated by a machine. So do I.
The machine can produce words. It can even produce good words. But it cannot produce words that cost something. And words that cost nothing are worth exactly that.
The Dead Internet and the Luxury of Humanity
There is a theory circulating online—aptly named the “Dead Internet Theory.” It asserts that the Internet now consists primarily of bot activity and automated content, manipulated by algorithmic curation, drowning out genuine human interaction.
Whether you view this as a legitimate concern or a conspiracy theory, it points to something very real. According to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, automated traffic overtook human activity for the first time in ten years, making up more than half (51%) of all internet traffic. This shift is largely attributed to the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), which have simplified the creation and scaling of bots.
And AI-generated articles are following the same trajectory. As of November 2024, 50.3% of new web articles were generated primarily by AI—before the dawn of ChatGPT, that number was just 5%. By April 2025, an analysis of 900,000 newly created web pages found that 74.2% of them contained AI-generated content.
This is the world we’re building. An internet where bots talk to bots. Where AI generates content that other “AI’s” summarize and share. Where the signal of genuine human thought is drowned in an ocean of predicted, probable, statistically optimal noise.
Here is the nightmare scenario for every marketer: You use AI to write a blog. Your customer uses AI to summarize that blog. In the end, no human ever actually engaged with a single thought. You’ve created a closed-loop system of “meaningless optimization.” You aren’t building a brand; you’re just feeding an echo chamber. To write with a human hand is to throw a wrench into that machine. It is an act of rebellion.
In such a world, human writing becomes something rare. Something valuable. A luxury good.
In the 19th century, handmade furniture was just “furniture.” After the industrial revolution, it became a “luxury.” We are at that exact moment with words. Soon, “AI-generated” will be the default—the plastic, mass-produced junk of the internet. If you want your brand to be a commodity, use the prompt. If you want your brand to be a luxury, use your brain.
Art Does Not Comfort
Here’s what AI cannot understand: good content does not need to be comfortable. In fact, the best content rarely is.
Art challenges.
Art provokes.
Art raises questions.
Art ignites thinking.
Art activates the brain.
AI, by its very nature, is programmed to be helpful. To be safe. To avoid offense. To smooth edges. To predict what you want to hear and give it to you in the most statistically palatable form possible.
But great marketing is not palatable. Great marketing is memorable. And memorable requires friction. It requires choices that surprise. It requires the writer’s willingness to say something that might not land perfectly, because perfection is boring.
When a sentence feels “off”—when it challenges your expectations as a reader—that is not a failure. That is the mark of a human mind at work. That is the gap between what you expected and what the author intended. That gap is where meaning lives.
The Writer’s Privilege
For years, we’ve spoken of the “writer’s dilemma.” The blank page. The empty Word document staring back at us. The cursor blinking in accusation.
I want to reframe that.
It is not a dilemma. It is a privilege.
The blank page is the one place where you have total control. Unlike the photographer, you are not at the mercy of the light or the weather or the color of someone’s shirt. You decide everything. You are the god of that small, white universe.
And exactly because of that control—because every word is chosen, not captured—what you create is art. It is an expression of your will, your voice, your soul.
That is not something to hand over to a machine.
The Manifesto
Look, I am not telling you to abandon AI. I am not telling you to uninstall ChatGPT or cancel your Copilot subscription. The technology is here. It will never go away. It will transform our lives and our work in ways we cannot yet imagine.
Use it for visuals. Use it for video. Use it for research, for brainstorming, for first drafts that you tear apart and rebuild. Use it for the ten thousand tasks where efficiency matters more than soul.
But when it comes time to write—really write—put down the prompt and pick up the pen. Stare at the blank page. Feel the weight of infinite possibility. Make your choices. Struggle with your vulnerability. Leave your fingerprints.
Because in a world where machines can generate a million words a second, the only words that will matter are the ones a human dared to choose.
The copywriter is not dead.
The copywriter is more necessary than ever.
