I am fortunate to have had a few excellent mentors and leaders in my career who believed in me and gave me an opportunity to learn, try and fail.

How many young communications professionals are being denied that chance because of the AI hype train?

Putting aside the fact that platforms like ChatGPT are known to lie, fabricate and even hallucinate answers; what about the fact that these platforms are taking jobs from up and coming writers?

I have heard multiple stories of young professionals either being laid off or having trouble getting hired because marketing and communications leaders are trusting their brand voice to unproven technology.

These LLMs—what are essentially next-word probability machines—are not writers, they are guessers that are not only known to completely make shit up but have essentially consumed all text on the web, including yours and mine, with no attribution or compensation.

If you are a marketing or communications leader deploying AI-generated writing in your organization not only are you risking your company’s reputation and exposing trade secrets to these AI models, you are taking away the opportunities you were given early in your career to learn, grow and succeed.

You are pulling up the ladder after you climbed it.

Let’s be clear, if your organization was not successful employing human writers, the problem isn’t the writers, it’s your strategy. Cutting costs by handing over your organization’s voice, tone, brand and even reputation to unproven LLMs is reckless.

AI can and will eventually make great contributions to humanity, at least I hope so, but it will never replace the human spirit that is the beating heart of great writing (yes even great business writing)

AI has a number of uses that have to potential to advance human achievement—identifying subatomic particles, uncovering the next digit of pi, analyzing cancer cells for a cure—but replacing human creativity, communication and culture is not one of them.

Hire human writers.