AI has commoditized content creation, making the writer’s trade feel worthless
With the advent of AI, companies might tell themselves they no longer need writers or content creators. After all, it is not that difficult to create a white paper, a blog post, a podcast, a presentation, or even high-quality video starting from a few prompts. Creating content is now within everyone’s reach. No need to know how to write, how to take photos, or how to film. AI does everything for you. It’s very convenient, leaving you free to focus on other things.
Creating content has become so easy.
But there is a problem.
Creating content with AI is like using a blender to infinitely recycle existing content. AI does not know how to invent. AI does not know how to narrate. It is very adept at doing your work quickly, but it lacks an essential ingredient:
- Imagination and the ability to tell us stories.
Give the best AI tools to someone, explain how they work and how to use them—if that person lacks a sense of narration or the ability to invent stories, they will always create something anonymous that anyone else could also create. Writing, filming, or singing with AI is nothing but recycling. It is the permanent risk of saying and re-saying what others have already said or will say again, because creating without providing an angle, a vision, a narrative sense, or a point of view in the world of AI means exposing yourself to seeing others tell and recount the exact same thing as you.
The risk of using AI is doing the same thing as everyone else
We already see this phenomenon on LinkedIn. People who previously had nothing to say are now writing long articles that are, in reality, merely summaries of other content produced by others, perhaps already summarized by yet others. Hence, more and more, this impression of monotonous repetition. The phenomenon is very blatant with, for example, the inflation of articles telling you an anecdote or some edifying knowledge which are just AI-generated ideas repeated by a thousand and one independent consultants. Nothing in these posts distinguishes them from others, except for their profile picture and their name. Creating with AI turns these improvised writers into Web parrots.
It’s the same for companies. If they start producing content by relying on AI and if they are not capable of inventing their own content, they will only be recycling, soul-less and flavorless.
It follows the same logic I described yesterday in my article on new AI-generated video trends. Someone suddenly has a creative idea. They share it. And a few days later, you have hundreds of identical or near-identical videos, telling exactly the same thing but with a different central character, drowning the original author in the crowd and saturating the Web with duplicated, replicated, useless content—flashes in the pan with no future!
That is why in 2026, the premium will go to those who know how to tell stories, to twist reality into an imaginary world to tell it from another angle: an original angle that touches people, whether emotionally charged or not, but that projects the reader or spectator into a universe they wouldn’t have thought of, making them see information differently, taking them on an adventure that breaks them out of their daily routine.
This is not a debate for or against AI.
I believe that AI can very well allow for storytelling.
It is a question of invention, imagination, and the ability to transform the vision of things, to transport someone to another world. And for me, this ability is something only some humans possess. I am not saying that everyone cannot be a storyteller; I am only saying that it requires a certain mindset and attitude. It is a rare quality, seldom found in companies where such roles were traditionally reserved for advertising agencies, but today it must be increasingly integrated into communication teams.
I see proof of this in what is currently happening in the US job market.
More and more companies are looking for people capable of staging stories, of transcending content through a more narrative approach, closer to writing a novel, a short story, a screenplay, or a play.
The percentage of ads featuring the word « Storyteller » has doubled in the US
The percentage of job offers in the United States on LinkedIn including the term « storyteller » has, for example, doubled over the year. This represents approximately 50,000 ads in the field of marketing and more than 20,000 ads in media and communication (source: Wall Street Journal).
The number of times executives mentioned « storyteller » or « storytelling » during earnings calls and investor days has increased significantly:
- 147 times in 2015
- 359 times in 2024 (for the full year)
- 469 times in 2025 (up to December 11th)
This is an underlying trend, not yet arrived in Europe, but it shows that in the age of AI, companies must seek something other than productivity and speed for their communication. Since those have become so easy, the value of content production cannot yield as much as before the time of AI. If they want to stand out, they will have to invent stories for themselves, create a strong brand and identity by inventing narratives around their DNA. And for that, they will have to go through humans, because AI alone without human intelligence, without sensitivity, used without human thought to guide it, is not capable of addressing and touching other humans.
Look at the Coca-Cola ad, whose great feat is having been generated by AI. It is a soul-less commercial that looks like a cliché of a Coca-Cola ad.
Look at the famous ad for Intermarché. What made its strength was, above all, the narrative it brought, the story it told. Without AI. But, once again, I don’t think that’s where the debate lies.
The question is not technological. It is human. In the age of AI, if you want to stand out, you won’t do it by producing tons of content thanks to AI. Everyone will be able to do that easily. You will do it by bringing an angle to your content, a way of presenting it, of telling it, of making it something that projects your readers and viewers into something innovative or new.
Pluribus, the new Apple series, is a perfect example of this. It’s not a commercial product; it’s an artistic production, but its author understood that he couldn’t tell yet another alien invasion story on the same eternal canvas if he really wanted to capture the viewer’s attention. It had to be renewed with an innovative approach and a different pen. And he succeeded perfectly. Hence the certain success of this new Apple series (the most viewed on the Apple TV platform), which fits perfectly into the current of what corporate communication should be today:
- Do not mass produce
- Ask the right questions and tell things from a particular angle
- Prioritize slow narrative time
- Avoid clichés or fads
I am convinced that to distinguish yourself, you will have to make this effort and find the right people to help you. Storytelling isn’t something you just make up. It’s a mindset, not a skill. Remember: creating content in the age of AI is not the issue. The issue is how we tell those contents.
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