Blizzard

 

By the time we stepped out of Washington DC’s Union Station last night, the blizzard had already been at work for a few hours. Snow came down hard and heavy. The kind that looks cinematic and inviting until you have to walk through it.

The roads around the station were mostly clear ... traffic had bullied the snow into submission. We grabbed an Uber without much trouble.

The city streets were unexpectedly busy. In the nation's capital even a blizzard can’t fully cancel the instinct to commute ... headlights glowing, brake lights blinking, snow reduced to wet grit by the sheer force of movement. But once we crossed into suburban Virginia, the mood shifted. The traffic thinned. The slush gave way to actual snow.

Even with the windshield wipers at full speed, visibility narrowed to a kind of soft white blindness. The world outside the windshield looked like an overexposed photograph. We could feel the tires crunch through fresh layers, that brittle, granular sound that says, “You are no longer in control.” Every so often the car would start to hydroplane before the tires found their footing again.

I kept waiting for the driver to say, “This is as far as I go. This is unsafe.” It would have been reasonable. Sensible, even. But he didn’t. Maybe there wasn’t anywhere decent to stop. Maybe he was young enough to be shielded by that sense of invulnerability that weakens with age and experience.

When we turned into our neighborhood, the car pressed the first tracks into snow that hadn’t yet been disturbed. When we reached our house and stepped out of the car, the cold was immediate, complimented by the muffled quiet that only heavy snowstorms manage. We thanked him. He told us to stay warm. We told him to drive safely.

Bags in hand, we trudged up the driveway, trying and failing to keep snow out of our inappropriate for the weather running shoes. I turned back just in time to see the white Toyota Corolla dissolve into the white curtain of falling snow. After it vanished, I could still hear the low hum of the engine and the steady crunch of tires on new snow long after sight had given up. I like to think he was headed home. Everyone should be, in weather like that.

AI Didn’t Kill Writing. It Killed the Illusion of Exclusivity.

 

Remember when marketing writing was a craft? A noble pursuit? A thing you earned with late nights wrangling ideas with swipe files and too much coffee?

Then, BAM: AI walked in, kicked the door off the hinges, dumped a stack of “pretty decent” drafts on the table, and said, “Hey folks, we’re all writers now.”

And now everybody is.

Your cousin. That kid bagging groceries. Some 18-year-old with half a beard and zero life experience (but a ChatGPT window open in three tabs). They're all pushing out content that’s -- let’s be honest here -- not brilliant, not Pulitzer-level, not “my God, this changed me.” But it’s good enough.

And “good enough” is the new nuclear weapon.

The Myth of the Missing Human Spirit

Professional writers, including me, defend this revolution by chanting: “AI has no soul. No emotional intelligence. No experiential context. No human touch.”

We don’t want to see that every person using AI actually does have those things. Maybe not enough to write copy or content that converts at an acceptable level, but at least enough of them to sprinkle over a draft like parsley on a plate of microwaved ravioli and call it a meal.

And Now the Market Floods

You’re not competing with AI. You’re competing with everyone AI just leveled up.

People who used to be shut out of the writing world? They’re here now. and they’re cheap. Some kid living at home can charge one-third of your rate and still feel like he’s crushing life. He’s not paying a mortgage. He’s paying for Red Bull and Wi-Fi.

Meanwhile, many seasoned writers are watching their careers quietly deflate like a sad parade balloon.

This isn’t a prediction. It’s happening. Right now. Right under our noses.

So What the Hell Do You Do?

You’ve got exactly two lanes:

1. Become a Machine With a Human Heart

Use AI. Use it hard. Use it fast. Become the writer who can produce in a day what used to take a week ... but with judgment, taste, experience, and that little thing AI (and many inexperienced writers) still can’t replicate: Discernment.

or

2. Serve the Clients Who Actually Care

There’s a small, precious slice of the world that still gives a damn about quality. That knows the difference between “fine” and “wow.” Those clients are your people. And we can hope that when the the landslide of "it all sounds alike" copy clears, this group will grow in numbers.

Everyone else? They’re shopping at the Content Dollar Store. And the middle, once home to millions of “pretty good” writers, is getting crushed like a soda can under a semi.

The New Reality

AI didn’t kill writing. It democratized it. Put it on tap. Made it available to everyone with a keyboard and a pulse.

And when something becomes abundant, it stops being expensive.

So no, the sky isn’t falling. But the ground is definitely shifting. And if you’re still standing still, you might not like where you end up.

_________________________

Some additional insight from veteran copywriters: 

Doug D’Anna:

CHAT-GPT … Sure, it can help you produce copy without much skill. Anyone can ask it to write a headline.

But it cannot install in your brain the mind’s eye that sees the available means of persuasion. It cannot train you to perceive the available arguments in every selling situation…

The bottom line here is this:  AI will bury the writers who never learn how to think.

But it will massively amplify the writers who do. 

Jordan Ring:

If you already can't write your way out of a paperbag...you definitely can't escape with help from AI. Good writers: AI is good news. Bad or lazy writers: buh bye.

Your Call Is Important to Us, Just Not Right Now

I called my dentist’s office yesterday, during business hours, to reschedule an appointment.

Instead of a human, I got Sally. Sally introduced herself as an AI assistant that works “alongside the team”. She was polite with the upbeat tone of someone who has never once had a cavity (or even a bad day). 

After gathering just enough information, she told me that someone would call me back … a fascinating bit of modern logic: I reached out at a moment that worked for me, and the system responded by promising a conversation at a moment that almost certainly won’t.

Maybe I’ll be in a meeting. Maybe I won’t recognize the number and let it drift into voicemail purgatory with the robocalls and extended warranty offers. Either way, the loop resets with a cheerful message asking me to call back ... and if I do, I will once again encounter Sally, the gatekeeper of deferred human contact.

It’s like trying to shake someone’s hand and being handed a coupon for a future handshake instead.

I get it. Efficiency. Optimization. Streamlining. Words that sound positive and intelligent until you notice they usually mean one side gets convenience and the other gets a maze. Businesses love efficiency, and maybe this is efficient … for them. Fewer interruptions. Less staff time. A tidy system humming along like a Roomba that occasionally eats a sock but we still call it progress.

From my end, however, it doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like we replaced a simple, human moment with a perfectly organized delay.

We keep dressing inconvenience up in futuristic clothing and calling it improvement. We polish the surface until it gleams, and then we stop asking whether the thing underneath actually got better. The shine becomes the argument.

I’m not anti-technology. I like talking maps, movies on airplanes, and the ability to look up Marx brothers trivia at two in the morning. But somewhere along the way, convenience stopped meaning easier for humans and started meaning easier to manage humans. Those are not the same thing.

A real receptionist might put me on hold, sigh a little, shuffle papers, maybe even mispronounce my name. Imperfect. Slightly inefficient. Entirely human. And somehow, in all that friction, the task would get done in about thirty seconds. No voicemail ping-pong. No polite robot promising phone tag.

Progress should feel like a door opening. Lately it feels like an elevator panel where every button leads back to the lobby.

Maybe this is inevitable. Every generation invents new ways to save time, then spends the savings explaining why everything takes longer. Maybe Sally is the future, smiling her frictionless smile while we press numbers and wait to be returned to ourselves.

Still, I can’t shake the suspicion we’ve confused motion with movement, activity with action.
Because if I call a dentist during business hours and can’t reschedule my appointment, I’m not sure the system is efficient.

I am, however, pretty sure that it’s very, very proud of itself.

The Unbearable Wordiness of Being (Now with AI Assistance)

Once upon a time, email was the necessary evil that allowed us to communicate with people we didn’t want to talk to, without the messy intimacy of a phone call. It was quick, efficient, and blessedly ignorable. You could respond to your boss’s 800-word memo with a single, blessed “Sounds good.” You could “circle back” or “loop in” with minimal damage to your soul.

But now we have AI. And suddenly, every exchange feels like it’s being ghostwritten by the collective spirit of Emily Post and HAL 9000.

Are you excited for your coworkers to become way more verbose? To see every terse acknowledgment balloon into a novella dripping with artificial sincerity?

That “Sure thing” that once took three seconds to type will now arrive as:

“Absolutely, Scott! I couldn’t agree more with your insightful perspective on the Q3 outreach initiative. Your leadership continues to inspire not just results, but meaning.”

And oh, the joy of the inbox! Because who doesn’t want to live in a world where every small business owner, club organizer, and slightly unhinged neighbor can now generate sleek, hyper-personalized marketing copy at the push of a button?

The same algorithm that writes customer engagement emails for Fortune 500 brands is now helping your local lawn-care guy send out:

“Dear Valued Community Member, We here at Steve’s Turf Emporium appreciate the deep roots we’ve grown together.”

You used to be able to spot a spammer by the mangled syntax and questionable punctuation. Now you’ll be deleting messages that read like TED Talks.

And let’s talk about emotion. Remember when sincerity had that lovely, flawed human awkwardness? When you could tell your friend meant well, even if his condolence email read like it was typed through tears and misspellings?

Now you get to wonder if he wrote it himself or if he just clicked “Generate Message: Empathetic Tone.”

“Your loss is unimaginable, but please know that your strength in this difficult time is a beacon to us all.”

Lovely, touching ... and entirely machine-made.

We’ve entered the uncanny valley of correspondence, folks. The messages are smoother, the grammar impeccable, the tone perfectly calibrated. And yet, somehow, every word feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t quite mean it.

The worst part? The machines didn’t steal our humanity ... we handed it to them, neatly formatted, with a polite closing line and an optional P.S.

So yes, AI and email together are the ultimate productivity duo. We can all now communicate faster, better, longer, and with precisely the same amount of emptiness.

Sent from my AI.