I’ve worked in copywriting for over a decade, so I have a good sense of what AI can and can’t do in professional writing. Volume, speed, efficiency, cost, reliability—AI outpaces humans by light-years in all of these. But two areas still make me think great companies need human writers (for now): context and taste.
Context. AI has vast context—essentially the whole internet plus whatever data it’s been trained on. But it lacks company context—the subtle, evolving knowledge that comes from being inside the brand. It doesn’t know the backstory behind a product launch, the compromises, the internal debates, or what features were cut or added last minute. It doesn’t sense what PMs or CEOs actually care about. That insider awareness is crucial to avoid derivative messaging and to build a coherent, forward-looking brand voice.
At minimum, someone still needs to pay attention—to guide AI with informed prompts and to filter out its tone-deaf or off-brand suggestions.
Taste. This is the part companies often overlook. AI can generate a thousand taglines, but who decides which one is worth keeping—and why? Who ensures the final copy feels original, inspired, and culturally right, rather than synthetic or awkward? In my experience, especially in Chinese companies with few (sometimes zero) native English speakers besides me, it takes a native writer to filter out the strange, bland, or tone-deaf outputs that AI often produces.
Will AI eventually replace us? Probably—in many areas like EDMs, ads, blog posts, and repetitive translation, it’s already there or close. Studies have even shown readers can’t reliably tell AI writing from human writing (Yale Daily News, 2024), and that AI poetry actually rates higher than human work (Nature, 2024).
Still, despite recent talk of an AI plateau since the underwhelming (but still remarkable) ChatGPT 5, it seems clear that a great writer using AI is far more valuable than a non-writer trying to replace one with it. And if AI ever truly gets good enough to make us obsolete, it’ll probably take half of humanity’s other jobs with it too. One credible expert even predicts we’re finished by 2027. ai-2027.com