Try to remember the last time you read a truly compelling piece of strategic content—something that spoke to the world as it is now while recognizing possibilities spinning into existence.

That particular piece—a white paper, perhaps, or a research report, or a point-of-view article—began with an idea. That spark was encoded in language, cultivated with data, enriched with examples. Its paragraphs were carefully and artfully strung together to transmit some specific meaning: what has happened, what will happen, what can be done, and how.

If you can recall a work that presented its ideas in such an engaging way that it made you profoundly shift your thinking—and possibly made you take action—then the authors did their jobs well.

But why, in this age of technological miracles, does all the aforementioned shaping, including the painstaking process we call editing, need to be handled by a living, breathing, idiosyncratic person? Why not make things easier with a modern-day genie: a problem-solving, decision-making set of algorithms? Let AI do the job!

Um, not so fast. Why not?

Because AI does not really understand

In simplest terms, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude are trained on datasets too vast to comprehend. We use terms to quantify these massive computational resources—“45 terabytes” or “trillions of tokens”—but it doesn’t really matter. Just imagine the LLM has read everything and anything, including the entire internet, to create statistical relationships. Everything and anything already written. Including content written by AI. Including the rash of opinions, the polemic, the whimsy, the wacko rants that fill our phone screens and invade our brains.

For now, this can still primarily be understood as pattern recognition, putting things together based on what was already there: recycling and pastiche. Is that how change is made, new ideas are applied, new industries are built, paradigms are shifted? What happens when it’s time to zig instead of zag? The algorithms, built upon popular wisdom cemented with unimaginable petabytes of data, can only mimic; they will not help something new fly.

For now, let’s leave the hard problem of consciousness and awareness to the neurologists and philosophers. Experts still agree we have years before AI becomes a fully autonomous conscious agent. Will this usher in the sci-fi singularity, complete with merciless robot overlords? It’s difficult to say, but until that time comes, true communication is up to us!

To have real impact, new thoughts must be distilled to their most persuasive essences. Meaning, especially the disruptive, the unexpected, and the revolutionary, shifts things for the better and must be distilled into something appealing. As yet, LLMs just don’t have the understanding—the intellect?—to consistently hit that mark. Bringing people to a new point of view requires good writing, which requires imagination—which requires people.

Because AI writes like, well, AI

Certain phrases that keep reappearing, the unmistakably bland tone, sentence structure that is oddly forced and overly balanced. The telltale signs are really starting to pile up. It has an unnerving effect: when you know something is off but you cannot quite put your finger on why. Like claymation or an extra expressive mannequin, AI writing sends readers into the uncanny valley, the phenomenon of experiencing something that is almost but not quite human.

For thought leaders and professionals who make their living parsing text, the weirdness is obvious: formality over flow, awkward transitions, and lack of specificity. For many, at that moment of recognition, the jig is up! If you know you’re being told by a computer, you can stop listening. You disengage. The personal touch that makes a point of view human is what keeps us open. Knowing we are getting this information from another person is what keeps us reading, and that can only, thankfully, be generated by people.

Because ideas are still shaped and conveyed by stories told by humans

All effective arguments are about stories. We have evolved biologically to understand life and ourselves through storytelling, and this applies to all parts of life, including business. It’s how humans connect.

At the core, business leaders, consultants, and marketers are all proposing ideas; every proposal is about turning ideas into persuasive and powerful messages. This requires a human understanding of the story being told. It needs nuanced and engaging language that the reader can only truly feel from another person. It demands the reassurance that you are engaging, as a reader, with a real person. Yes, the endless discursive dialogue thrown together by AI seems to be drawing to a point, but if you look closely, read closely, it never quite gets there, does it?

The content you need to shape your world—to influence your clients—still needs to be shaped by people. It is a living thing, a dialectic that requires a minimum of two. At least for now.