I recently read an essay from Danny Gregory titled Should we be afrAId?, and one line has been stuck in my head:
“Software may do a lot of ‘creative work,’ but it can’t touch the messy, complicated truth of being human.”
Danny is a writer, illustrator, and co-founder of Sketchbook Skool, and he’s spent years helping people rediscover creativity in their everyday lives.
His point is AI tools can generate images and video, draft scripts, write social copy, but they’ll never have those pieces of you that make your work stand out. Your sense of humor. Your history. Your everyday experiences.
They can remix, but they can’t relive. They can sound fluent, but they can’t feel.
And when it comes to creative work, that human imprint matters.
For me, AI is a regular part of the process. It helps me come up with social content ideas, generate good questions for a podcast guest, develop presentations. But the spark that makes the story worth telling—a funny moment during an interview that makes everyone laugh, a pause in someone’s voice, a little personal detail that an algorithm wouldn’t pick up—that’s the stuff from the human side.
That’s why I agree with Danny and don’t see AI as a replacement. At best, AI reflects only what we’ve already put into it. Moving forward, I want to ask myself these questions more often:
Am I creating work that’s just optimized for clicks?
Or am I making something honest enough that a machine couldn’t possibly replicate it?
Time will tell on whether it’ll actually replicate it one day, but for now, I’m sticking with this approach.
Parting Thoughts
Danny ends by reminding us:
It’s not the instruments that matter, it’s the song.
And the song will always need a human voice.
How are you balancing AI tools with your own human voice in the work you create?