Why You Should Not Use AI to Write About Human Experiences

So here is a slightly funny one.

A while back I built myself a voice persona. Basically a profile of how I write, my tone, my quirks, my bad habits, the lot. I even built a whole framework around it and wrote about that here. And I got a bit excited. Whoa, cool. Maybe now I can get AI to write my blogs for me. My articles. Even my marketing. All in my own voice and personality. Sounded brilliant at the time.

After two or three articles, nope. Not going to work.

And here is the thing. It was not because the AI wrote anything bad. The grammar was clean. The structure was tidy. It just tries too hard. Too overzealous with the facts and the figures, too eager to sound clever, and the flow still feels… off. Not human. You can almost feel it reaching. Every paragraph wants to land a point, every sentence is busy doing a job, and nothing is allowed to just sit there and breathe.

AI still struggles to write a human experience. Obviously! It has never once experienced what it actually feels like to be human. It can line up all the right words about a feeling, but it has never sat inside one.

That framework of mine is genuinely good at catching the AI tells (those dead giveaways). But the whole exercise taught me something no framework could ever fix. It can copy how I write. It has just never lived any of it.

So ever since, I have gone back to hand-typing a good 95% of this blog myself. Claude Code helps me tidy a bit of punctuation here and there, maybe run a few fact-checks or a little research on my own writing (on what I have actually written, not trawling the internet for me). And that is the whole point. Everything you read here is my human experience. Not something a machine scraped off the web and cobbled together. Words should carry feelings. This is why I still believe humans should write, if you want to communicate with another human.

Funny thing happens once you have done this for a while.

Now, whenever I read LinkedIn posts, news articles, blogs, forums, all the techie stuff, I can just… spot it. I can tell who is getting AI to write for them. The AI is leading them, and not them leading the AI. There is a difference, and once you have felt it from the inside, you really cannot unsee it. Sometimes I cannot even tell you exactly what gave it away. It is more of a gut thing. The words are all correct and the whole thing still feels a bit empty.

It actually helps me decide whose work I would follow, and whose I would quietly skip. Being human, I genuinely enjoy reading human experiences, written by real humans, sharing their own thoughts and their own hard-won knowledge. Not something researched and stitched together by a machine that has never lived any of it.

Here is something I still believe. People do business with people. Not machines doing business with machines. Or people doing business with machines. The world might feel like it is drifting that way right now, but I reckon people will clock it the moment AI is the one pushing a product or a service at them.

It is the same script every single time. You know the one. A recruiter spams my LinkedIn inbox or my email with that smooth, templated, could-be-anyone message? Straight to spam. Gone. But the moment something is clearly written by an actual human, a typo here, a comma in the wrong place, a sentence that lands a bit clumsy, I take notice. I pay attention. I will give them some of my time, and I will actually reply to a real, personal message. Funny thing is, it is those little mistakes that get my attention in the first place. A real person sat down and wrote it, typos and all. (not the kind written email or message from an African Prince who has $100M inheritance and needs to borrow a “small” deposit from you to help them unlock the funds and thus doing so willing to share it with you lol)

Which makes me genuinely curious. How many smart, switched-on people out there can actually spot the difference between the AI-generated stuff and the real thing? I honestly do not know. Maybe we are all a little ignorant to it without even realising. But I know this much. I enjoy interacting with humans. Communicating with humans. It is the same when you get stuck talking to a customer support bot. It does the job, sort of. But it is just not quite the same feeling, is it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. None of this is me being anti-AI. Far from it. I use it far more than most of you for sure if you can beat my daily hours on it!

AI-generated images and illustrations? I am completely cool with those (honestly, no issue at all). That is an obvious, genuinely good use for it. But some things just still need that human touch to them.

Take photos. The ones I really enjoy looking at, I love that little nostalgic feeling of an unfiltered photo. Something real, something a bit raw. Not brushed up with filters, not AI-refined into something glossier than the moment actually was. I just enjoy the honest version more. Always have.

And here is one that caught me off guard. I am a big music listener. For the last 25 years anyway. And these days I have somehow become quite attuned to spotting AI-generated songs! Genuinely. Once your ear clocks it, you start hearing it everywhere, same song structure and that immaculate vocal pitch. What a world we are living in.

So that leaves me with one quiet little question. And I really do not have the answer to it.

In the future, will we humans miss what is real?