It Sounded Like Me. But I Didn’t Write It.

It was just a regular afternoon, and I was working on the content for a brand. Not really writing but sort of writing – what a lot of us who work with AI in marketing do these days.

I was reviewing a post: captions, visual keywords, the whole thing already laid out for me. The output of a workflow I’d built myself. I just needed to check it, find the image, and paste it in.

I looked at the caption. It was fine. Good, even. Almost there, just some minor editing; a quick fix. So I moved something around, made some edits and hit schedule.

And then I sat there for a second with this odd feeling I wasn’t expecting.

It sounded like me. But I didn’t write it.

As a marketer, it’s very strange to say that. What I write for myself and what I write for a brand is not the same. I can be snarky, or just plain deprecating of myself or something I see, read, or am doing. But when it comes to a brand, I must always sound like that brand. It has been a part of my whole life – writing for myself and others and changing the pen type each time I approach a new brand.

Whether that brand is staid and formal, fun and cheery like the girl next door, or a little more technical yet connected to the audience. Those are all valid voices, but not mine. Although they are sometimes mine, even if it is only for a while.

When I write for them, it feels like mine. My words, my ideas. But it never really is mine, at the end of the day.

So I’m not sure why it feels weird. That the text I approved isn’t mine. I can’t explain why it feels slightly off. It just does.

My entire career, stories have always been the thing I come back to. Not a channel, not the formats, not the tool. The story. Whether I was building a national event or writing a caption for a small business, the question was always the same: what story am I telling today? What will resonate with this audience?

And now I’ve built something efficient enough to make me sit with a very uncomfortable question. Is this still my work? Am I still part of this equation?
For those of us incorporating AI in marketing these days, these are legit questions that sometimes keep us up at night.

I don’t have a clean answer. The ideas were mine. The direction was mine. The judgment about what stayed and what got cut; also mine, since I’m the one editing and approving.

But the words. The actual words. Those came from somewhere else.

Here’s what makes this complicated. I’ve been reading the same news pieces you probably have. That companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are paying six-figure salaries for human storytellers. That the people who built the most powerful content tools in history went out and hired humans to tell the story of those tools.

Because they already know: AI can be efficient, but it cannot tell the story.

So I know, intellectually, that the story is still mine. That the machine is just a faster way of getting the words out. That is what I bring. The humanity, the story, the connection - the things that can’t be automated. At least I hope so. Or maybe all I can wish for is that it can’t be in my lifetime: let the next generation figure that out. I’m not sure that I want to lay this issue at the next generation’s feet either.

But here we are.
And this unsettling feeling still sticks with me. My words, but not my words.

Maybe that’s what all of us are doing right now. Trying to figure out where we fit in this new world. Where the human ends and the tool begins.

I’m still finding my space. Are you?