By: Lee Wochner
I got my first job, at age 14, because I was already good at using two tools: the telephone, and the IBM Selectric II — a typewriter.
Because I had already mastered those tools, having exactly that model of typewriter at home and conducting interviews over the phone there for the fan press while typing notes, I got hired by the Atlantic City Press to take classified ads Monday through Friday from 5 to 9 p.m. The workforce for that shift was five “middle-aged” ladies (they were probably in their 30s) and this 14-year-old high-school runt.
Those were tools, and Artificial Intelligence is a tool.
What I brought to those tools are the same things I bring to this new tool: good grammatical skills and some human intelligence and personality.
I share this by way of saying: AI is a useful tool but it’ll never replace Einstein, Edison, Curie, Tolstoy, or you.
Let’s look at writing.
Here’s what AI can do reasonably well:
- Summaries
- Books, articles, meeting notes, etc.
- AI is great at condensing long info into something short and digestible
- Product /service descriptions and some elements of marketing
- Short, catchy content with specific goals.
- E.g., e-commerce blurbs, ad headlines, social media captions.
- Technical Documentation
- Code documentation, how-to guides, manuals.
- Super consistent and can pull from lots of examples.
- Emails (if they’re templates)
- Outreach, follow-ups, customer service, etc.
- Formal or casual, depending on tone.
- Blog posts and articles (first drafts)
- Especially when the topic is well-defined.
- You can use AI to create a structure, fill in ideas, and rewrite. (But you’ll have to rewrite.)
- Scripts (for YouTube, podcasts, training videos)
- Structured and informative or entertaining formats.
- You’ll need to tweak it for tone and length.
- Code (and explanations)
- Writing functions, debugging, or even entire scripts.
- It’s helpful for learning and building quickly.
I think of most of this as, say, framing a house, which is the sort of thing almost anyone can do under proper supervision. But if you want a design for the house, you want an architect. The architect is an expert.
Here are the things AI cannot really do:
- Have real emotions or consciousness
- It doesn’t feel anything. It can describe emotions, mimic emotional tone, or say “I understand,” but it’s lying — because it doesn’t actually understand or care.
- Real writing? That involves transmitting actual understanding and caring. Stephen King might give you the shivers or Maya Angelou might lift you up — AI can at best try to mimic those sensations.
- Have lived human experience — or strategic expertise
- Without memories, physical senses, or lived culture, AI fails at anything that relies on personal insight, cultural context, or real-life moments. Reading AI attempts at personality is like eating the cardboard cereal box instead of the cereal.
- Think abstractly like a human
- What separates humans from animals is our ability to dream and to extrapolate. Animals have emotions, but cannot extrapolate. AI doesn’t even have emotions.
- Abstract concepts drive intellectual pursuits. AI will never match Picasso, or Clay Christensen, who developed the concept of disruptive innovation. Descartes’ observation that “I think, therefore I am” would be impossible for a machine.
AI will also never…
- Be mortally or ethically aware — and that’s important
- Understand context fully. Sarcasm, subtle implications, shifts in tone or hidden meaning… these things are important, no?
- Create completely original ideas.
And AI will never be…
- You.
AI will never replace your voice, your taste, your quirks, your intuition, your weird ideas, your brilliant insights, your passion, your dedication, or anything else that truly makes you you.
So: How best to use AI?
Use it to lay groundwork, to help you think about structure, to perform research. Use it like an assistant, because that’s what it is: an assistant. It can save you time and spur your thinking. (Which is exactly how I used it in writing this article.)
But the actual genius being assisted? That’s you.