The Connection Engine​
Use AI well. Stay human.
Build what matters.

I think I've done more genuinely creative work in the last six months than in the several years before it.

Not more work. More creative work.

This creative work includes ideas I would have abandoned, threads I would have dropped, and projects I would have quietly talked myself out of.

Yes, AI is faster. That's true, and it's the least interesting part.

The story everyone tells about AI and writing is speed: do the same work quicker, make more of it, save hours. What actually changed for me isn't the pace. It's the creative process itself.

Yes, AI is also scary. There are real things to be concerned about with AI. The labor questions are real, the energy questions are real, and the concentration of power in a handful of companies is also a legitimate concern. Not to mention the cybersecurity hacks that are already happening.

But, none of that is what this newsletter is about. I'm talking about one narrow thing, which is AI as a creativity enhancer in the hands of somebody who has something to say.

Most of what people hate about AI writing, I also hate.

Obviously, slop is real. I see it every day. Fluent, confident, weightless writing that nobody needed and nobody meant.

So, when someone tells me AI writing is a horror, I don't argue with them. I know what they've been shown.

And, that's why it's worth noting that there are now three kinds of writing to consider:

• Some people write entirely by hand, every word their own, and they always will. That's real, it's worth respecting, and some of the best writing will keep coming from these individuals.
• Some people are straight-up exploiting the tools. Volume, slop, whatever's gameable. Yuck.
• In the middle are people with something to say, who work with AI, yet stay in charge of it. That's most of us already. At least I hope so.

The critics have seen only the first two. The trouble is that the third approach has no name. There's no easy way to talk about it.

Apparently, the detection algorithms can't see it either. A detection tool read the last edition of this newsletter and reported it as "100% AI-generated." Maybe that's a new kind of AI hallucination.

It is certainly a strange verdict given that every edition of this newsletter is something I personally conceived, directed, argued with and revised multiple times.

Likewise, acclaimed writing authority Nicolas Cole mentioned in a webinar I attended last week that his writing is also getting flagged.

When the only two labels available are human and AI, the work most of us do is artificially discounted.

But no name doesn't mean there's no skill involved.

Here's what using AI well actually looks like:

Building past the chat window.

Most people's experience of AI writing is pasting a paragraph into a box and asking for polish. That's the shallow end, and it's where nearly all the horror stories come from.

The approach I recommend is a system that carries your positioning and vocabulary. It eliminates the phrases you've retired, while upholding your standards.

It takes real work to build, and it changes AI's output entirely.

Knowing when AI is wrong.

A review by a "human in the loop" is essential. For example, I audited my own AI voice system this week and found it out of date in multiple places. None of these errors announced themselves.

A stale system doesn't fail loudly, it falls out of date bit by bit.

Catching that is judgment, not tooling.

Bringing the meaning.

This is the part that should never be underestimated.

Most of the direction I give isn't about sentences. It's about deciding what matters, what's worth saying at all. I have to ask which concepts are the real ones and which are decoration. That's closer to emotional work than technical work.

The machine has no stake in any of it. It cannot care what this is about. That has to come from a person.

Which is exactly why creativity is the thing that gets enhanced rather than replaced by AI. These new tools give me more room to play creatively. They don't tell me what to do with it.

A machine can tell you a sentence looks like AI wrote it. It can't tell you whether it was worth writing.

If you've got something worth saying, I'd love to hear what you're working on. An AI creative director like me just might be able to help.

Any questions?

Until next week, stay curious,

— Jon Leland AI Creative Director