AI has turned us all into little Hemingways

I've been in awkward meetings where the authors of marketing documents sat down having not yet read their own work.

AI has turned us all into little Hemingways. Smooth lines, confident tone, not a typo in sight. Everything looks like it was written by someone who drinks long blacks and has opinions about linen. Except half the time the writing is saying absolutely nothing. It's like we gave a robot a thesaurus and it decided to run marketing.

You can see where this is heading. Marketers won't just use AI to help with a plan, they'll get it to actually do the plan. Their managers will get their own AI to review it. And the two systems will start emailing each other like a pair of polite civil servants in Merrion Square, discussing "alignment" while the humans are staring at the screen wondering why Outlook suddenly feels smarter than them. Whole projects will sail from kick-off to sign-off with nobody meaningfully involved.

Give it a bit longer and you'll have robots making work for other robots, with humans floating around the edge doing that nervous nodding we all do in meetings when we haven't a clue what's happening. AI will write the strategy. Another AI will summarise it. A third AI will send a meeting invite nobody attends, because overnight some automated workflow quietly approves the whole thing.

That's the risk. Not that AI will make the writing worse. It won't. But it'll make the nothingness sound good.

AI is actually brilliant at forcing this honesty. Ask it to explain the strategy to a non-marketer. In plain language. No fancy words. No poetry. Ask it to rewrite your paragraph without the buzzwords, and now you're looking at something my 9-year old twins would understand. That's the test. Removes all the places to hide. Once the sentence is plain, you have to stand over it.

Our robot friends give us polish for free. It's kinda cool in one sense. But it also makes hiding easier than ever. The advantage now is in the marketer who can look at the polished thing and say, "Right, but what does any of this actually mean?" The one who can ask the daft questions without embarrassment. The one who uses AI not as a ghostwriter, but as a truth serum.

Because if everything sounds smart, the thing that matters is what's actually true.