There's an ongoing and often heated discourse about generative AI. 

As a creative, I am deeply scandalized about the ethics of how these systems used authors' and artists' work to train their machines without consent (and therefore a breach of copyright). 

Read: The Law and Ethics of AI Creativity (St. John's Law Scholarship Repository, 2025)

And as a corporate girlie, I also understand how AI can be an efficient, cost-saving tool, especially when used to streamline tasks and support productivity.

But that's the operative word: tool.

Writers and many other creative professions have been deemed at risk because of AI. That alone has made me circumspect about using it, especially when my own livelihood feels precarious.

And I read somewhere that in these uncertain times for writers, the one skill that could be of great importance in the time of Gen AI is editorial judgment. 

There is indeed a wealth of AI "humanizer" tools available for free, but I will die on this hill that an actual human brain is always more superior than any machine to humanize content.

Editorial judgment is a learned skill, honed by years of training, trial and error, and the innate discernment of a seasoned eye. 

Yes, efficiency and speed are important in the corporate world, but feeding AI-generated content to another AI tool seems counter-intuitive and inefficient. When you rely solely on a "humanizer" algorithm, you’re just swapping one set of mathematical probabilities for another.

And that, again, is my point: these are merely tools.

You cannot give a hammer to an untrained person and expect them to build a functional, well-constructed house. 

A hammer—or any tool for that matter—needs a person who can wield it to its full potential. Someone who knows the art, the skill, the knowledge needed to create something.

The same principle applies to writing. Editorial judgment is what turns a collection of words (or, as they say, AI slop) into a narrative that breathes.

AI can generate text, yes. It has the ability to approximate tone, mimic structure, churn out paragraphs at a pace no human can match. But approximation is not craft, and speed is not quality.

AI can never replicate what a human brain can create.

Another area of the human psyche that AI can never replicate no matter how much material they regurgitate to "learn" are empathy and emotions. 

Human empathy is shaped by memory, culture, and contradiction. AI merely processes input; it does not inhabit experience.

And in the context of the corporate world, the novelty of automated content has worn off consumers. 

As brands lean more heavily on AI to generate social media posts and marketing collateral, audiences are hitting a wall of "content fatigue"—a direct result of encountering the same predictable structures again and again:

"It's not X, it's Y."

"No X. No Y. Just Z."

Every brand sounds the same now. Each marketing copy has sound robotic and void of any emotions.

Yes, speed and efficiency are impressive. But at what cost?

In today's digital landscape, audiences crave authenticity more than ever. And authenticity requires vulnerability, humor, empathy—things no algorithm can ever manufacture.

Just as each era transitions from one technology to another, so too does the craft evolve. However, evolution does not mean erasure.

No matter how advanced AI can become, the need for human insight will always remain a constant.