An Honest Review of AI Content Tools (From Someone Who Writes for a Living)
Every time I tell someone I work in content strategy, they immediately ask me about AI. At dinner parties, at school pickup, at the dentist. My dentist, a wonderful man named Dr. Park who has been gently judging my flossing habits for eight years, recently asked me if AI was going to replace writers while his hands were literally inside my mouth. I gurgled something noncommittal. He took that as a yes.
It's not a yes. It's not a no. It's what my college philosophy professor would call "a nuanced position," which is what you say when the answer is complicated and you're hoping nobody asks follow-up questions.
But people deserve a real answer, not a gurgle. So here's my honest, no-stakes, nobody-is-paying-me-to-say-this review of AI content tools, after a year of using them seriously.
What they're genuinely good at
Brainstorming. This is where AI earns its keep, for me. When I'm stuck on an angle, when I need to generate twenty topic ideas to find the three good ones, when I'm staring at a blank doc wondering if I've ever had an original thought in my life, AI is a great sparring partner. Not because its ideas are brilliant. Most aren't. But they're abundant, and abundance helps when you're stuck.
Research summaries. Need a quick overview of a topic before you dive deeper? AI is great at giving you a starting point. I used to spend forty-five minutes reading background articles before writing. Now I spend fifteen minutes reading an AI summary and then thirty minutes reading the two or three sources that actually matter. Net time savings: real.
Outlines and structure. If I have a bunch of scattered thoughts and need to organize them into a coherent piece, AI is surprisingly helpful. It's like having a very efficient colleague who's good at putting things in order but doesn't have strong opinions about anything.
Editing for clarity. "Make this paragraph simpler." "Find the jargon." "Where am I being unclear?" For these specific editing tasks, AI is often better than a first pass from a human editor, because it's ruthless about complexity in a way that polite human editors sometimes aren't.
What they're mediocre at
First drafts of anything that needs voice. AI can write a clean first draft of a product description or a feature overview. It cannot write a clean first draft of an essay, a thought leadership piece, or anything that needs to sound like it came from a specific human with specific opinions. The drafts are competent and soulless, like a hotel room that's perfectly functional and completely forgettable.
Understanding audience. You can tell AI about your audience. You can give it personas and demographics and psychographics. But it doesn't know your audience the way a human writer who's been immersed in that world does. It knows about them. It doesn't know them. That's a crucial difference.
Humor. AI can be instructed to be funny. The results are the kind of funny that makes you exhale slightly through your nose, not the kind that makes you laugh. AI humor is dad jokes without the dad. It's technically structured like a joke but missing the human timing and the willingness to be a little awkward that makes humor actually land.
AI content tools are like a very well-read intern: impressively knowledgeable, unfailingly polite, and completely lacking the lived experience that makes writing interesting.
What they're bad at
Knowing when to break the rules. Great writing breaks rules on purpose. It uses fragments. For effect. It starts sentences with "and." It goes on tangents that seem irrelevant and then turn out to be the whole point. AI follows patterns. Rule-breaking requires understanding why the rules exist in the first place, and AI doesn't understand. It matches patterns.
Original thinking. AI can synthesize existing ideas in new combinations. It can't have an original thought, because original thoughts come from the collision of lived experience, emotion, and the kind of random Tuesday afternoon observation that no training data can replicate. When I wrote about my grandmother's recipes and brand voice, that came from a specific memory in a specific kitchen. No AI has a grandmother.
Saying something unpopular. AI content is consensus content. It's the average of everything it's been trained on. Which means it will never tell you something surprising, counterintuitive, or uncomfortable. And the best content, the stuff that actually changes how people think, is almost always at least one of those things.
The bottom line
If you're a writer and you're not using AI tools at all, you're probably working harder than you need to on the mechanical parts of writing. Try them for brainstorming, research, and editing. You'll probably save real time.
If you're a marketer and you're thinking about replacing your writers with AI, please don't. Or do, and then call me in six months when your content all sounds the same and your engagement has flatlined. I'll be available. My rates will have gone up, but I'll be available.
The best setup I've found: human writers using AI tools the way a carpenter uses power tools. The carpenter still designs the furniture. The carpenter still makes the creative decisions. The power tools just make certain parts of the process faster and less tedious.
Nobody looks at a beautiful table and says "what a great circular saw." The saw helped. The craft came from the carpenter.
AI will make mediocre writers slightly better and great writers slightly faster. It will not make anyone into a writer who isn't already one.
And no, Dr. Park, it's not going to replace me. But I promise I'll floss more.