Yeah, yeah, we all know that AI has been the number one topic for most marketers, leaders, and founders alike in the past 12 months – probably even longer, but I don’t have the patience to work out exactly how long. With Cannes coming up, I can imagine it will remain the hot topic there too.

Buzzwords like automation, speed and utility are spread across industry publications like graffiti on a London alleyway. There is no escaping the fact that AI is here. And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good reasons to use it.

It gives us access to more channels. I spent my entire career being a time-poor marketer, and with new platforms popping up all the time, channel management became almost impossible to control; now AI helps with that.

What it doesn't help with is differentiation. Many people think AI gives itself away through certain words. It doesn't. Good writers also use words like delve, landscape, and transformative. What gives AI away is usually something much deeper.

With AI there are no scars.

Human beings are messy, complicated and often interrupted by their own new thoughts. When you read an article written by a human, it tends to zig and zag, allowing you to even imagine the person who has written it talking to you. AI doesn’t do that. AI likes to round every sentence up in a neat formula. Human stories contain mistakes, awkward moments and contradictions. AI, on the other hand, smooths it out. Humans have always been imperfect. That’s why we enjoy their stories. A glimpse into someone's thinking, scars and all.

The problem isn't that AI writes badly; it is that it writes too well.

While it removes the hesitations, contradictions, quirks and imperfections that make people sound human, the very things audiences use as signals of authenticity, it’s making a lot of brand content sound too similar. If your audience can't tell you apart from everyone else, you've got a problem. Being remembered starts with being recognisable. The irony is that as more brands use the same tools to create content, sounding different becomes even more valuable.

Nobody talks like that

Every single AI sentence is polished, but people do not speak in perfect paragraphs. I recently asked AI to rewrite the opening of one of the most distinctive novels ever written. The result was technically flawless, perfectly coherent yet utterly forgettable. I can’t include it here for copyright reasons but in the original version of Catcher in the Rye, the voice feels like a real person talking, but an AI editor would be tempted to sand off precisely those rough edges, and in doing so, the writing may become more polished, but it’s certainly less distinctive.

Why some stories stay with us

I think back to some quality TV ads of the 80s and 90s. The ones that caused emotion to remain in my head 40-odd years later. This is storytelling at its finest. Those ads stood out because they didn't feel interchangeable. You could remove the logo from the end and still know exactly which brand had made them. The best bit? I still remember the brands behind them. Can’t say that for many of the ads I see on TV now.

When you’re Coca-Cola, for example, and you know that your truck with ‘holidays are coming’ excites kids at Christmas, that's probably why they're still wheeling it out almost half a century later – fuck! I’m also half a century old. Anyway, I digress…

Another great example is when your story makes people laugh. I have never smoked a cigar or drunk whiskey in my life, but I remember the Hamlet and Famous Grouse ads that I must have seen when I was around 8/9 years old, better than I remember why I walked into the kitchen 20mins ago.

Stories help us make sense of chaos

Psychologists have long understood that people look for meaning, patterns and causality. Stories give us all three. If you have a complex product or offering, turning your brand messaging into a story can help your audience make sense of it.

When it makes sense to someone, they are more likely to buy into it. AI is incredibly good at generating information, but information isn't what humans have evolved to seek. Humans seek meaning, and meaning usually arrives through story.

The irony is that as AI floods the world with more content, the brands that win attention may be the ones that remember that people don't connect with information; they connect with stories.

AI will help us create more content than ever before. It will make us faster, more efficient and more productive, but the brands people remember won't necessarily be the ones creating the most content. They'll be the ones that still sound human.