When is a story not a story? AI versus humans

Week in week out, we’re contacted by businesses offering to use their AI tools to enhance our client attraction, improve our targeting, reach thousands of new prospects, even create content without human intervention. In the marketing business, AI is suddenly everywhere, doing everything it seems.

But is this good for the industry?

Are we losing more than we are gaining?

Sure, we're a communication business, we sell copywriting and content production services. We have a dog in this fight. But we genuinely feel the rush to integrate AI into the way we find clients, talk to customers and build brands is costing us dearly. The facts show that humans prefer to engage with humans when given a choice – as evidenced by the 75% of customer service callers who say they want to talk to a real person not a bot to resolve their issue - especially when the topic is complex or sensitive.

Ultimately, the human element remains essential in communication. Lose it and you lose your audience. Which brings us back to the title of this piece. In the content business, is a story written solely by software still a story? Or is it something else?

The case for AI

AI’s biggest advantage lies in its efficiency. Media companies say they're using AI to not only to streamline workflows and optimise costs, but to enhance creativity and scalability across content production, distribution, and monetisation.

This efficiency is reflected in impressive statistics: in the publishing sector, 28% of organizations report AI as a regular part of their business, with another 39% experimenting with AI-powered content solutions. For media supply chains, adopting AI for translation can cover up to 80–90% of localisation tasks before human intervention, drastically reducing turnaround times and costs. Market forecasts predict the ‘AI in Marketing’ sector will reach $217 billion by 2034, attesting to the scale of this disruption.

The case for human input

Yet, even as AI revolutionises what’s possible, the need for human involvement in content creation remains essential. AI excels at generating content based on patterns in existing data, but it lacks genuine creativity, emotional intelligence, and the capacity for nuanced storytelling that resonates on a human level. Humans draw from lived experiences and cultural contexts, infusing content with anecdotes, humour and empathy—qualities that are critical for brand voice and ethical standards.

Human editors also play a vital role in ensuring accuracy. While AI can pull and summarise facts at speed, it can and often does struggle with reliability, source attribution, or understanding the consequences of publishing erroneous information—especially in sensitive areas such as finance or health (better known as "Your Money or Your Life" content). Human oversight is needed to verify statistics, maintain trust, and ethically navigate bias and complex cultural terrains.

A question of trust

The importance of trusted content is highlighted by ongoing debates surrounding intellectual property and credible information. With GenAI tools sourcing content from publishers—sometimes without permission, attribution, or compensation—the industry faces risks to the integrity and viability of quality journalism. Publishers must harness AI’s benefits while defending against practices that undermine originality, accountability, and public trust.

Storytellers are people, not machines

AI is disrupting the content production industry with unprecedented speed and scale, providing tools to automate, personalise, and expand media output. However, continuing to invest in human input is crucial to ensure contextual relevance, emotional connection, ethical standards, and reliability. The future of content production is not machines versus humans, but collaboration—where AI manages efficiency, and humans elevate creativity and provide the essential personal connection.

At the end of the day, a story without the human element is not a story, it’s simply cold and impersonal code.

Freelance Words uses AI for administrative tasks. We don’t use it to produce content. Call us old fashioned, even Luddites, but we believe effective communication needs a beating human heart.