This feels like a rant. But let’s call it a conversation.

I was going to write about bad microcopy this week as a follow-up to last week’s issue, but some major shakes happened in the product world (as usual) and I wanted to talk about something that must be increasingly on everyone’s minds lately…

So OpenAI dropped Ghibli-style image gen, and boom, everyone became a Studio Ghibli director overnight.

Your cat.

Your house.

Your cousin’s wedding.

All reimagined in pastel swirls and fantasy fields. It’s cute. It’s fun. It’s…a little terrifying?

Because while the internet is busy dreaming in AI art, some of us are sitting here thinking:

Wait. Are we losing our edge?

Let’s talk about that.

The creativity crisis pretty much everyone seems to want to admit (but I’m pretty sure most of them talk about it to sound cool and different on the LinkedIn feed. The thing about being cool and different though, is that when everyone tries to be different, it just kind of resets everything because that becomes normal—and cringe. Dyg?)

Here’s the thing: I love AI.

I use it. A lot.

This newsletter literally exists because I can bounce ideas off GPT when my brain goes, “No thoughts, just vibes.”

But also—I worry.

I worry that the more we lean on AI, the less we learn how to lean into our own creativity.

That maybe, one day, I’ll sit down to write and find that I can’t string a sentence together without first asking, “Hey ChatGPT, what’s a punchy headline for this?”

And that’s a bit scary. Actually, a lot scary.

Because creativity isn’t just cute slogans and clever taglines. It’s our species’ survival skill.

It’s the reason we have planes, cars, skyscrapers, and yes—AI.

And now we risk trading it in for convenience.

I think AI is not the enemy, but laziness might be.

AI isn’t the villain in this plot. Over-reliance is.

You know that feeling when you can’t move forward on an idea unless AI tells you how?

Yeah. THAT is the creeping threat.

The quiet replacement of your instincts with machine suggestions.

And it’s showing up in UX writing too.

You prompt a tone. You get a line. You copy. You paste. No edits. No touches.

And it’s all cool and great until suddenly, your microcopy starts sounding like everyone else’s. Generic. Safe. Robotic.

Not because you aren’t a great writer, but because you’ve outsourced the part that makes you…you.

Microcopy still needs a human soul

I spent last week talking about good microcopy, so if you missed that issue, you can catch up here 

Microcopy is amazing when it feels like it was written by someone who gets it. Who’s been there. Who knows the stakes of the moment, whether that’s a failed payment or a first-time sign-up.

AI doesn’t know your user’s anxiety. It doesn’t know the moment. It doesn’t understand your product like you do. It can guess, but it can’t feel. And that’s where we come in.

You can’t outsource context and emotion to AI, no matter how awesome of a job you think it’s doing. (This reminds me of something that happened in a community I’m a part of. A newbie designer shared a survey form for a project, and one of the community members, who’s also a designer, advised him to just get the data he needed from AI because no one fills out survey forms anymore. Like, really!???)

The future isn’t about AI vs. humans. It’s about Humans + AI

Here’s where I land:

The people who’ll thrive in this AI-collab future are not the ones who use AI the most.

They’re the ones who know when to use it, how to edit it, and where to stop it from doing too much.

They’ll understand that the real skill isn’t prompt engineering—it’s context engineering.

(Yes, I made that up. No, I’m not sorry. I’m going to make up a lot of terms around context because I’m the context preacher. On a side note, that sounds like a pretty neat X username. Back to the point👇)

At the end of the day, context is still king.

And if we let AI rule without it, we’ll keep getting generic microcopy, AI-generated “art,” and soulless everything.

TL;DR?

Use AI. But don’t lose yourself in it.

Be the reason your copy sounds different.

Don’t let the tool become the creator.

You are not your prompts.

And maybe—just maybe—close the tab and write something from scratch today. Just to remember how it feels.

2025 with Content & Context 🤝 

This year, I want to take you on a journey.

Not just through my takes on what content founded on better context looks like (it looks pretty good actually), but through the world of UX writing itself. What it is, what it isn’t, and why it matters in product UX in general.

And because you’ve been with me through this journey so far, I’ve put together something special: a free resource, UX Writing for Small Teams. It’s my way of saying thank you and making sure that even if you don’t have a UX writer on your team yet, you can start creating better experiences right now.

You can grab it here.

Now I know this resource may not be beneficial for everyone, so if you have a special resource request, please reach out by replying to this email with what would be beneficial to you. That’s what UX is about, really.

New Here? Catch Up on These Reads

Here are a few past articles you might enjoy:

• Can I tell you a joke? 

•  B-rated... 

•  How to "unalive" a good product idea 

•  This thing called UX writing... *sigh 

And if you liked this issue, click the comment icon to go drop us a comment.

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