‘I scroll on as soon as I realise it’s AI – which is pretty much immediately.’
These are the exact words of a local builder – a specialist in textured concrete counters for kitchens, to give the details – who knocked on my door to ask about writing copy for his banners and website.
It’s not often clients come literally knocking on my door. (There are other channels.) And it’s not often they offer unsolicited feedback about content marketing. But there it is, he did, on both counts and it prompted me to write a post about something that’s been bothering me for a while.
In my work, I see some clients utterly giving up their brand voice for AI-generated content. I went through a period, like many writers, asking myself: am I seeing something here others are not?
Clearly not. At least not now. What began as an industry argument among copywriters has trickled into the public’s consciousness with talk of AI slop and culminated (for me at least) with the chat with the builder.
Here’s the full quote. ‘I scroll on as soon as I realise it’s AI – which is pretty much immediately. I want you to write something for me that sounds like me, so that people feel like I am talking to them and it’s not a robot.’
Amen to that. And it’s the kind of thing I am hearing more and more.
In my experience, businesses sweat over their brand voice. I have seen marketing teams working on values and mission statements, and obsessing over individual words, until they lose their meaning and we all need a lie down. I have seen MDs eulogising their own commitment to their customers, through anecdotes and numbers. They send me long and passionately felt emails, all of which have made it into copy full of heart and human voices.
In the task-optimising gold rush that is ChatGPT or Claude, I have also seen those same businesses scupper their efforts by churning out generic AI content.
I say ‘gold rush’ because I am reading an excellent book about that subject – The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. It tells the story of people from across the globe – the East Coast of America, Europe, Australia, Central and South America – hearing about the precious metal deposits in California and giving up everything to venture on cholera-ridden, hazardous voyages to the gold fields. As I read, I can’t help but see the analogy with AI. People lost their minds in the scramble for gold. Many their lives. A few profited. Most who stayed, as the industry expanded, became day labourers.
I think many businesses have lost something in the scramble for AI optimisation. Because they are giving up a medium that could help them communicate sincerely and effectively with customers – and help close deals. And for what? Essentially, it’s just for words that fill up a page.
Here are some things clients have asked me to do, particularly in the earlier days of AI:
This last one is a real problem I am noticing more and more. Clients are visiting industry events and – instead of bringing some genuine human reaction to proceedings, and reaching out and touching audiences with emotion – they are writing a few bullets and feeding it into AI. The results are horrific. Here’s an example, based on the language patterns used by a respondent, but created by me (to maintain privacy):
‘Being someone with a background in destination marketing, I found it interesting to explore the conference firsthand and thoroughly enjoyed the engaging discussions with subject matter experts. It was truly an insightful, memorable and rewarding experience, leaving me eager to return once more.’
Doesn’t the world feel staler and more claustrophobic after that? Like a data centre somewhere gulped a dose of oxygen it is never giving back? And this is not a one-off – for some projects, quotes by respondents have almost universally been subcontracted to AI. And we are replacing humanity with a simulacrum of humanity – which is not the same thing and not nearly as interesting or effective.
Some people might say yes, but clients I work with strongly disagree. Many were burnt in the early days of AI content and have seen the damage it causes. Most, particularly in highly regulated sectors, pore over the minutiae of their websites to send out the right trust signals to attract high-net-worth clients. Logos, colours, messaging, photography – they care passionately about each of these elements. I respect their approach. That attention to detail is what closes deals. Nobody looking for a service is enthusiastic about phoned-in messaging.
And none of these elements is more important than the tone and language you use. And clients will respond to sincere, human-written words in a way they will not to AI-written ones.
This is the very reason many of my clients go out of their way to put me in touch with subject matter experts and their own customers. They take time out of their everyday roles to facilitate these meetings. And they aren’t doing it because they are fierce defenders of the human copywriting community. They are doing it because they know detail, authenticity and storytelling work – and human-written copy (just ‘written copy’, perhaps?) commands attention in a way that AI copy never will.
Trust in the Age of Generative AI, released 21 April 2026 by Meltwater and YouGov, reveals 86 per cent of consumers say AI-generated content should be disclosed.
Meanwhile, Wits Innovation Lab reported in 2026 that 79% of marketers increased their investment in AI-generated content in the past 12 months, but there has been a 44% collapse in consumer preference for AI content. The bubble is clearly bursting.
And, lest we forget, Coca-Cola created ‘the most profitable commercial in Pepsi's history’, according to commentators, in December 2025 with its soulless, AI-generated version of its Holidays Are Coming campaign.
Alan Watts, the great explainer of Eastern philosophies, remarked that we tend to see life as a journey with a destination: a job, a bigger house, success. When we get there, however, we feel cheated. There’s nothing ‘there’. He said life was more like music. We don’t listen to a symphony eager to get to the final note. If that were the case, there would be composers who only dealt in final notes. Instead, the point of music is the playing and hearing of it, moment, by moment.
You may be thinking it’s a big stretch to compare Watts on the meaning of life to a blog post designed to get bums on seats for, say, an upcoming webinar. I really don’t think it is. AI is going to rush to the end, to ‘design for success’ in a very on the nose manner. It’s not thinking at all, in fact, but spouting one word after the other in a predictable sequence based on other similar pieces of writing. By copying and imitating, it’s burying itself in mediocrity and striving for the predictable. But, mostly, it’s just getting to the end as fast as it can.
When you or your copywriter writes, you aren’t doing that at all. At least not if you are doing it properly. You’re talking to people. Interviewing colleagues. Building a case. Plucking an analogy, just like I have with this Alan Watts section. There are moments – or there should be – when you are utterly ‘in’ the writing, connecting with your imagined reader with no other motive than making that connection.
This is what writing is: connections. A continual reaching out, again and again, sentence by sentence, that together adds up to something bigger. It’s almost impossible to fake that. And just as hard not to respond to it in an equally human way. This is where your potential client will find the thing they are looking for in all business communications: authenticity, sincerity and humanity.
At the end of the day, only humans can be human and only humans can write like humans. And your clients can tell the difference.
The local builder’s observation is not an outlier. Many people contacting me talk about AI and the negative impact it has had on their brand, or on another brand they are desperate not to emulate. I recently completed a project for a client in conflict management who came to me because she’d read my blog. She saw humanity and humour there, and she wanted some of that in her own copy.
This was a particular joy to me because I have, at times, quite wilfully loosened up on my blog and talked in a more discursive way. It’s my ‘post-work pint’ writing style, I guess. Seeing her connect and respond to this tells me we are all looking for humanity and connection. My clients. Their clients. Everyone in and out of business.
So let’s keep it human. It’s where the real gold lies.
Martin Philp run Coast Content Marketing, a small copywriting and content agency helping highly regulated industries, tourist providers and clients across all sectors grow their reach through credible communications. Get in touch to talk to Martin.