In a world increasingly shaped by AI, the future of our most cherished Human skills – writing, designing and creating – is at risk. As AI generates more content, it reduces our language to a bland, uniform “vanilla,” stripped of the richness, personality, and nuance that comes from lived physical experience. This shift could make our language feel more like a processed product than a living, evolving form of expression. The key is to remain aware of this transformation. We value and celebrate the unique, unexpected, and deeply Human aspects of language that AI simply cannot replicate.

One of the biggest concerns we non-technical Humans have about the meteoric rise of AI is what will happen to us? What will become of our highly developed Human skills of reading, writing, drawing, rendering, translating and designing? Will these become quaint, hobbyist skills, such as the ability to churn butter, card wool, tan leather or keep bees? Will we be losing valuable abilities that we ought to cling to? Or do we let them go and accept that we are just another generation of Humans bearing witness to the evolution of our species?

Every generation builds and uses new tools to meet the technology of the times, and in so doing, renders a certain number of our grandparents’ skills obsolete. We become the shoulders upon which our children will stand when they assume control of the world, and we will soon have nothing to say about it. Our children may live comfortably in a world without physical books or newspapers. The future may never demand of them to read anything exceeding 250 words. Their world will demand a new set of skills, such as prompt engineering, bot training or hallucination-checking.

AI models generate text based on the patterns they find in large datasets and find their next words based on probability. They sift through mountains of data to identify the most frequently-appearing combinations of words, phrases and clusters of phrases. The probability of an answer being correct is based on the number of times a certain combination of words is found ‘in the wild’. The more it sees of the same, the more of the same it generates. This can lead to a uniformity in style across all our communication channels, and it will be ever-harder to find the strange, unexpected, original Human phrasing.

Imagine the sentence:

“The sun sets behind the mountains, causing the sky to become orange and pink.”

Something like that can be found easily ‘out there’.

One could also say:

“The sun sinks behind the mountains, igniting the sky into a burst of tangerine and cotton candy.”

The AI will find far fewer instances of the second and it will likely ignore it.

An AI model lacks real, physical lived experience, and can only perform a mashup of what it finds in its digital dataset. A Large Language Model might understand and mimic emotional content, but this is based on the data it finds about the lived experience of Humans. It can inject subjective viewpoints, anecdotes or perspectives or employ storytelling techniques, but only if it finds it online in the first place.

Which it can do very convincingly. ChatGPT was asked why a particular person, who doesn’t exist, decided to become a veterinarian. It came up with a credible personal backstory on demand:

After spending her childhood in a small, rural town Anna developed a deep affinity for animals. One summer, a wounded stray cat wandered into her backyard, and she couldn’t bear to see it suffer. Determined to help, she enlisted the guidance of a local veterinarian. Witnessing the compassion and expertise of the vet left an indelible mark on her. From that moment on, she knew she wanted to dedicate her life to caring for animals, and so began her journey towards that practice.

AI models aim for neutrality and objectivity, hedging their bets. Models avoid nuance, tone, emotion, expressing an opinion or infusing personality; all the things a Human writer does thanks to their ego and the importance of their lived experience.

The English language belongs to the world. Oxford and Boston fold in style from West Indian master storytelling, creativity additions of American ghetto slang, Shakespearean drama and African texture. English is multicolored with all the accents, vocabulary and ideas from near and far; India, Canada, Africa, the islands and the Americas. In addition to this, the vast number of English speakers, some 80%, are non-native, speaking it as a second or third acquisition. Language is culture; their perspectives melt into the language, shifting it every day, adding to the complexity of our global communication platform, making it a living, changing tapestry.[i]

Generative AI sees all of this complexity and quantizes what it sees – converts it to a mathematical system of weighted tokens and puts it into a blender. Texture, strangeness and originality are broken down and whirled into an understandable, ultra-processed linguistic smoothie that all looks and tastes like vanilla.

As Humans lose their writing-from-scratch skills, ever more dependent on text-generative AI to do the heavy lifting, and as AI generates more and more, we will read and interact with an ever-lower percentage of Human-generated content in the world.

Will we learn to write more like AI? Will the rich color drain from our own language and become drab and wordy, cliché-ridden and in perpetual cover-your-ass mode, since that will be all we see, hear and consume? We may likely never notice the Human voice ebbing away. Or we may cease to care, because what we gain – instant, global shared understanding – is more valuable.

The key is not to try and fight this reality. This is a battle we Humans have already lost. But rather to be awake to it, bear witness to the loss and to add some weighted value of our own. Place extra value on the words we don’t always use every day to enrich what will soon be oceans of vanilla making up our Creative Commons. We do this by celebrating the unique, the unexpected and delightful: the Human language.

Reach out to me for advice – I have a few nice tricks up my sleeve to help guide you on your way, as well as a few “insiders’ links” I can share to get you that free trial version you need to get started.

No eyeballs to read or watch? Just listen.

In a world increasingly shaped by AI, the future of our most cherished Human skills – writing, designing and creating – is at risk. As AI generates more content, it reduces our language to a bland, uniform “vanilla,” stripped of the richness, personality, and nuance that comes from lived physical experience.

About Fiona Passantino


Fiona helps empower working Humans with AI integration, leadership and communication. Maximizing connection, engagement and creativity for more joy and inspiration into the workplace. A passionate keynote speaker, trainer, facilitator and coach, she is a prolific content producer, host of the podcast “Working Humans” and award-winning author of the “Comic Books for Executives” series. Her latest book is “The AI-Powered Professional.