Artificial intelligence has altered the economics of communications and marketing. Thanks to large language models, someone who has never written a blog can create a month’s worth of posts in minutes.

Now, more than half of all English-language content on the internet is generated by AI, and for some, the “dead internet theory” is starting to feel a little too real. When language, structure, and insight are increasingly synthesized from the same underlying models, content begins to blur together, creating a sense of detachment from lived experience, accountability, and a real-world perspective.

We have reached an inflection point with humanity emerging as a differentiator, because it is something that AI simply cannot replicate.

Pattern Recognition Is Not Judgment

The way an LLM makes “decisions” is markedly different from a person. It does not weigh competing values, assume responsibility, or experience consequences; it simply predicts the next most likely word based on patterns in its training data.

What looks like judgment is actually statistical pattern-matching. This distinction matters to teams like ours, who specialize in marketing, communications, and stakeholder engagement. Decades of experience in the field have taught us that human connection is what makes a campaign successful.

AI isn’t capable of emotions; it operates without any inner awareness or qualia. This inability to feel means it cannot truly understand how outputs will emotionally affect people. Empathy remains a fundamentally human capability, one that is essential to shaping messages that resonate.

When AI Makes Sense

That is not to say there isn’t a place for AI. For boutique firms like ours, the ability to automate certain tasks, like preliminary research, for example, enables us to spend more time providing strategic guidance to our clients.

We do not, however, hand over our entire process to AI; humans always remain in the driver’s seat. We fact-check every piece of information before integrating it into our work. Nothing is ever taken from an LLM and used “as is,” nor does it play any role in decision-making, strategy, or design.

Why? Frankly, we can’t trust it because it makes a lot of mistakes and it simply cannot measure up to what we, as experts who’ve been doing this for years, are capable of. We certainly aren’t alone in that sentiment.

Growing Skepticism

While most professionals use AI tools in their own work, they draw a clear line when it comes to persuasion and influence. More than three-quarters of B2B marketers view AI as a helpful productivity tool for execution, but fewer than half trust it to inform strategy, and just 6 percent trust it for positioning.

The same can be said for consumers. While 85% report using AI personally, they have mixed feelings about brands doing so. More than 50 percent say they’ve become more distrusting of AI content, and 30 percent actively avoid ads labeled as AI-generated.

Even without a label, the sheer amount of AI “slop” has made it easy to recognize the language patterns that LLMs overuse. Studies have found that people can identify AI content nearly 55% of the time.

Decision-makers across industries also report growing skepticism toward AI-generated materials, not because the technology is unfamiliar, but because its widespread use has diluted credibility. Thirty-two percent of professionals now discover content through generative AI tools, but demand “evidence density” and authentic voices for engagement.

Nearly 75% of business leaders prefer human-led thought leadership when evaluating ideas, products, and potential partners, particularly when it is grounded in original research or direct experience. This aligns with many marketers reporting higher engagement and stronger lead generation when content reflects lived context rather than synthesized consensus.

Augmentation Outperforms Automation

Autonomous agents can work faster, but fail up to 49% more often due to errors in context, ambiguity, or quality areas where human discernment excels. When content is created en masse without clear ownership, errors persist, nuance is lost, and messages drift away from the realities they are meant to address.

As a result, teams that have opted for full automation report a nearly 18% decrease in productivity due to time lost correcting mistakes and cleaning up AI-generated messes. Teams that use it as a tool to augment their workflows, on the other hand, achieved a 68.7% efficiency improvement over those with fully autonomous AI agents.

Where the Advantage Really Lies

AI alone does not provide a competitive advantage that comes with people who understand what these tools are capable of and what their limitations are.

Our communications and marketing consultants recognize that AI can support execution, but it cannot think, feel or strategize. We know that empathy cannot be automated and that humanity cannot be born from patterns in data.

And that is precisely why AI cannot replace us.

Looking for human expertise? Get in touch.