Emma Procter, Communications Director, Publsh GroupScrolling through LinkedIn in 2026 feels like wading into a low‑grade war – a stand‑off between the writing purists and the prompt‑and‑paste brigade.
Someone is “so done” with the robotic slop clogging their feed. Someone else is irritated by founders whose posts read as though they were dictated by C‑3PO. Editors – and I don’t blame them – are rage‑typing about yet another pitch that opens with “in today’s fast‑paced digital landscape.” The pitchforks are out, and it’s all getting a bit, well, weird.
That’s why, in a market suddenly awash with faintly identical copy, a genuinely human voice has never been worth more. When anyone can produce something passable in seconds, the one thing that still sets you apart is the thing no machine can fake – a distinctive point of view, written by someone who actually holds one.
For anyone trying to build a recognisable voice, the opportunity has never been riper.
I’ve watched this shift from both sides of the fence — first as a journalist, now as a PR head – and I know the familiar tug of war over who has it worse, who chases whom, who is more misunderstood. Then along came AI, and suddenly the industry had something existential to fight over.
Not long ago, we were promised the death of the writer – all of us apparently weeks away from the scrapheap, replaced by software that never asks for a day off. The opposite seems to be happening; the flood of forgettable, faintly robotic content has made the real thing precious again. AI can polish a sentence, but it can’t manufacture a flawed, specific, lived point of view.
Which brings me to the self-appointed detectives running everything through AI‑detector software, convinced they’ve cracked the case. The trouble – as plenty of copywriters are now pointing out – is that these tools aren’t catching robots at all. They’re measuring how smooth and predictable your writing is. The cleaner and more assured you sound, the guiltier you look.
Hilariously, they have flagged the American Constitution as machine‑made. Less hilariously, they routinely punish non‑native English speakers whose phrasing reads a shade too tidy.
The accusation lands on precisely the wrong people. Even the makers of ChatGPT quietly retired their own detector once it proved no better than a coin toss. So, the next time someone waves a percentage score at you like a smoking gun, smile, and carry on.
Before I’m mistaken for a writer shaking her fist at the future, let me confess that I love AI. Claude and I have had some cracking Saturday night debates.
I reach for it when I’m stuck on a phrase, when I need to check a fact before it embarrasses me in print, when I want a second opinion. Used well, it clears the donkey work and hands back the time to do the part only a human can.
But there’s evidence that over‑reliance comes at a cognitive cost. Researchers at MIT recently examined what happens to the brain when it leans too heavily on a chatbot, and the findings are alarming. The heaviest users showed the least mental engagement, doing less of their own thinking with each task until many were simply copying and pasting.
It sounds like an obituary for AI, but it is really an indictment of how we use it. The machine didn’t make anyone duller. Switching our own brains off did. AI is a tool – a brilliant and exciting one – but a tool all the same. The fault was never the technology.
Wherever you happen to sit in this industry, use AI by all means – but use it with taste and discretion. Stop rewarding speed as though it were the same thing as quality. And value – properly value – the people who can actually write. Right now, they’re worth their weight in gold.
By Emma Procter, Communications Director, Publsh Group
