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.

Valentine's Day Rant

 

Valentine’s Day, oh Valentine’s Day: the holiday that convinces the world that love can be packaged in red wrapping, chocolate, and slightly awkward greeting cards.

Every commercial screams, “Show your love like never before!” But what does that mean? Send flowers? Buy overpriced jewelry? Present chalky candy hearts with goofy messages?

And chocolate. The ads imply that buying a heart-shaped box automatically turns you into a romantic genius. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. I can buy a chocolate heart the size of a small moon, but if I forget if you prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate, congratulations ... you’re now emotionally traumatized.

Then there’s dinner. Every restaurant ad shows candlelit perfection: soft music, laughter, clinking glasses. Not me. I sit in reality trying to get a reservation, navigating menus I can’t pronounce, and praying the dessert doesn’t come with a “romantic” sparkler that sets off the smoke alarm.

And let’s not forget the singles. Oh, the singles-targeted ads. “You deserve love too!” they whisper, while simultaneously suggesting that self-love can be purchased in candle sets, bath bombs, or a subscription box of existential reassurance.

Valentine’s Day: where marketers make billions convincing humans that love is a product, chocolate is a solution, and social media likes are evidence of affection.

Shake Things Up: Go Old

You can almost hear the conference room fluorescent lights hum when someone says: “We need fresh thinking.”

Then right on cue, a parade of resumes of under 30 candidates hits the table like it’s a casting call for a toothpaste commercial instead of hiring brains to solve real-world messes.

Because youth = innovation, right?

Wrong. There’s a whole other group who actually invented half the “fresh thinking” you’re now desperately clawing toward. They’re experienced older candidates ... and when you overlook them, you shoot creativity in the kneecap.

The Myth: Experience makes you rigid.

The Reality: Experience makes you dangerous.

Folks over 50 aren’t polishing nostalgia on a shelf. They’ve been through the spreadsheet wars. They’ve survived bosses with “synergy” tattooed on their brains. They’ve watched “disruption” rise, fall, rise again, and get a TED Talk sponsorship.

And after all that?

They’re not here to politely nod at the same old “big idea” disguised with a new gradient color palette. They’re here to poke the system with a stick and see what yelps.

They ask the provocative questions. The ones everyone else is too scared to say aloud because they might derail the “Let’s all agree we’re brilliant” vibe. Stuff like:

“Why are we doing this the hard way?”

“What if we stopped worshiping the data and actually listened to the humans?”

“Has anyone noticed this idea is just last year’s idea wearing sunglasses?”

“What if we do the exact opposite?”

Those aren’t questions. Those are creative grenades.

Boom! Out goes the boring. In comes the unexpected, the unpolished, the uncomfortable, the actual spark.

They’ve seen the conventional answers. Which means they’re free to chase the un-conventional ones. They’ve run the playbook, highlighted the margins, folded the dog-ears, and realized something powerful:

Innovation isn’t youth. Innovation is courage. And experience tends to grow a thick, gorgeous layer of “I really don’t care if this idea scares you.” That’s rocket fuel.

If you want groupthink, go young. If you want novelty that’s really just nostalgia in sneakers? Young again. But if you want someone who’ll flip the table, question the premise, rewrite the problem, and mean it? Hire someone who’s lived a few creative lives already. They’re not trying to prove they belong anymore. They’re trying to make something worth belonging to.

So, stop treating experience like it’s a dusty file cabinet and start treating it like it’s dynamite with opinions. The future doesn’t belong to the youngest thinkers. It belongs to the boldest. And bold only happens when you’ve seen enough to know what’s worth breaking.

Bring in the older candidates. Because “fresh thinking” isn’t always young. Sometimes it comes with silver hair and a wicked grin that says: “Alright kids, let’s blow the doors off this place.”

Poll Results: How Copywriters Are Using AI in 2026

 In an informal, unscientific survey, responses from copywriters who are using AI focused on a "healthy use of AI," using it to remove drudge work, spark ideas, and improve drafts while keeping humans in charge of strategy, voice, and final decisions. Responders indicated that the more AI handles low-value tasks, the more a copywriter’s value concentrates in high-level thinking clients can’t automate.

1. Research and discovery

Use AI to speed up prep, not to replace your own judgment.

• Scan large volumes of material to surface angles, objections, and questions you then verify and refine.​
• Turn messy notes, transcripts, or briefs into organized bullets or outlines you can interrogate and reshape.
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2. Outlining and structural help

Keep control of the message, but let AI help with scaffolding.

• Generate several outline options for a landing page, email sequence, or article, then choose, merge, and adjust based on strategy.​
• Ask for headline buckets, section labels, or CTA placements, then rewrite them in your own language and brand voice.
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3. Brainstorming and unblocking

Treat AI as a brainstorming partner whose ideas you always improve.

• Use it to propose variations: hooks, angles, metaphors, objection-handling lines, or lead-ins you then refine or remix.​
• When stuck, have it produce “bad but different” drafts to argue with, sharpening your own thinking in contrast.
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4. Draft refinement and polishing

Keep your draft as the source of truth; use AI like a smart editor.

• Ask for alternatives for a specific sentence, transition, or CTA, then select or rewrite rather than copy-paste.​
• Use it for readability passes, tone smoothing, list formatting, and grammar catches, while you own the nuance and emotional punch.
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5. Repurposing and scaling assets

You provide the original; AI helps with versions and formats.

• Take a cornerstone piece you wrote and have AI propose social snippets, alt intros, or length-adjusted versions that you then tweak.​
• Use it to adapt content to channels (email, social, short script) while you guard positioning, claims, and voice consistency.

NOTE: A small percentage indicated that they don't and won't use AI in their copywriting process.

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