AI can never connect or create

One seemingly throwaway comment my client made during a meeting turned out to be the harrowing arc to his story.

Hamish trains young people for huge swimming challenges. Most are only 14 or 15, yet these swimmers cross the English Channel, swim marathons and relays, and train in icy seas through winter.

He himself swam his first challenge in the sea with his father when he was only five, and now has a long history of training and organising swim teams. He’s helped injured service men and women while in the military – he suffered a back injury himself – and he’s coached many students in his role as a secondary school teacher.

We were working on a website promoting ‘The Big Swim’ challenges, which will be undertaken to highlight the issue of sewage pollution. We’d had a couple of other meetings. Our site plan was set, and much of the copywriting was written. Yet, the story was missing something – it wasn’t yet connecting on a deeper level to tie the whole project together.

We met again. My aim was to connect the swimmers’ experiences with the real-world effects of pollution. I wanted to know the impact it was having on their training.

I knew the teams use an app to track sewage releases, and avoiding these regions disrupts training. I also knew Hamish and his friends had experienced illnesses directly related to water pollution. But what he revealed at this meeting was an experience that was life-changing.

Hamish told me he’d become so ill during training that he lost a lot of weight. He experienced bleeding and terrible discomfort. His doctor was so concerned that he was sent for multiple tests and scans – the doctor suspected Pancreatic Cancer. Thankfully, the scans came back clear. He’d picked up a severe intestinal infection, likely from polluted seawater, which took several months to fully recover from.

This, understandably, was the turning point. It’s why he joined the many voices raising awareness about the hazards of sewage pollution. He and his team of young swimmers set a series of Big Swim challenges to draw attention to the issue.

If I’d asked AI to help me write copy for The Big Swim website, it would undoubtedly spit out data about sewage releases and current petitions to the government. It would also give me concise text around specific events and swimmers that I upload. But it could never have a conversation with Hamish that connects on a human level to reveal what might only come up in passing. That nugget that a real person connects with, that turns loose threads into a well-knit story.

The essential takeaway

AI can never connect or create; it can only imitate what’s come before and spit back out manipulated text that we feed it. No matter how sophisticated the prompts, it can never tap real experience and emotion.