The business case for human writing.

This week, one of our clients gave us an interesting assignment. She sent us four blog posts and asked us to tell her which ones were written by humans, and which were written by AI.

My first thought: Game on. I’m a writer! I’m a human! I was made for this moment!

Then my second thought crept in: Would I be able to tell the difference? AI writing gets cleaner and more coherent hour by hour. And we get more used to the patterns in its voice, tone, and structure. It’s learning from us, but it’s also shaping our ideas on what passes for good writing. So I wondered: Have we gotten to the point where AI can match a good, human content writer? 

The verdict from this particular exercise isn’t in (I’ll let you know when I know), but here’s what I’m seeing from the AI content our team has edited and the human content we continue to create.

AI writing—when it’s generated from clear, specific prompts—is error free, can mimic a conversational tone, and can even use examples and metaphors to illustrate points. But it lacks human style, personality, nuance, and—perhaps most importantly—discernment. The examples can be tone deaf. The metaphors, strange. 

Next to AI writing, excellent human writing feels like a breath of fresh air. The sentence structure is varied—one long sentence, then a short one, then an even longer one that lits across the page. It has a rhythm to it. Surprising turns of phrases. Elegant transitions. And quirky word choices that somehow sound just right. Human writing doesn’t just spit out facts. It sings.

But here’s the rub. Even though great human writing is artful, content writers don’t traffic in art. We traffic in business results. And so the real question isn’t whether we can tell the difference between AI and human-written content. The real question is this: Does human writing still matter to the business world?

Marketing thought leader Neil Patel recently ran a study in an attempt to answer that question. For 12 months, his team tracked how AI blog content performed against human-written blog content. Here are the results: 

So why did the human-created content perform so much better? “It largely comes down to context and emotion,” says Patel in his report on the study. “AI can write a 2,000-word article on any number of complex topics, but it cannot often put it into the context of larger concepts. This means that AI-generated content can miss out on nuance and important contextual insights.” 

And then there’s emotion. Long before generative AI came onto the scene, my friend and colleague Adam Morgan wrote the influential business book Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business, primarily using studies from neuroscience to show why original, creative, and thought-provoking content gets better results.

AI simply can’t do this type of writing. It can’t think and feel like humans do. It doesn’t have original ideas. It hasn’t felt the emotional devastation of a wildfire ripping through a childhood home. It can’t taste the difference of a homegrown tomato. We bring these lived experiences to our writing in all kinds of subtle ways—whether we’re writing a sustainability narrative or a simple recap of a corporate event.

Now we just need to convince the folks who control the marketing budgets to keep investing in human storytelling. They may not care about creativity and the craft of writing. But they do care about business results.

As AI writing continues to flood the marketplace with formulaic content, human-written stories will stand out even more—it’s what audiences will click on, it’s what will move them through the sales funnel, and it’s what will persuade them to change their behaviors and actions.