AI Can Write Your Copy. It Can't Write Your Character.

Let me say something that might sound strange coming from someone who uses AI everyday.

I use AI in my work constantly to pressure test ideas, to structure thinking, to move faster than I could alone. But there is something AI cannot do. And right now, in a marketing landscape where everyone has access to the same tools producing the same output, that something is the only thing that actually matters.

AI cannot write your character.

What character actually means

In film, character is not personality. It is not tone of voice or a list of adjectives on a creative brief. Character is the specific set of beliefs, contradictions, fears and commitments that make a person, or a brand, fundamentally themselves.

You know a great film character not because they are consistent. You know them because they are specific. Because there is a way they see the world that could belong to no one else. Because when they speak, you recognise something true. Something that couldn't have been invented, only discovered.

That is what the best brands have always had. And it is exactly what AI cannot generate.

AI is trained on everything. That is its power and its fundamental limitation. It produces the most statistically likely version of any given thing. The average of all the voices it has absorbed. It optimizes toward what has worked before.

Character, by definition, is not the average. It is the specific. The unexpected. The thing that makes you unmistakably you.

What is actually happening right now

I read a lot of brand content. It is part of my job. And the pattern I see emerging is this: as more companies hand their content over to AI, the output becomes more technically correct and less worth reading.

The sentences are cleaner. The structure is tighter. The keywords are in the right places. And there is nothing in any of it that you would remember tomorrow.

Because memory requires specificity. And specificity requires someone, a real person with a real perspective, to have been brave enough to say something specific.

The brands disappearing into the noise are not disappearing because they are using AI. They are disappearing because they have outsourced the one thing that could never be outsourced. The decision about who they actually are.

What I learned from directing actors

When I directed films, the hardest part was never the technical execution. The hardest part was helping an actor find the specific truth of a character. The thing underneath the lines that made everything they said feel inevitable rather than performed.

You cannot tell an actor to be more authentic. Authenticity is not a direction. It is a result. It comes from specificity. From knowing exactly what this character believes, fears, wants and is unwilling to give up.

The same is true for brands. You cannot brief your way to character. You cannot A/B test your way to a soul. You have to do the harder work of actually knowing who you are, and then having the courage to say it out loud, consistently, even when it means not sounding like everyone else.

The competitive advantage nobody is talking about

In a world where every company has access to the same AI tools producing the same quality of technically correct content, character is the only differentiator left that cannot be replicated.

You can replicate a tone of voice. You can replicate a content format. You can replicate a posting frequency. You cannot replicate the specific accumulation of decisions, failures, beliefs and commitments that make a brand genuinely itself.

That is your moat. Not your product features. Not your SEO strategy. Not your content calendar.

Your character. The thing AI can describe but never become.

Where I come in

Helping brands find and hold onto what makes them specific is the work I care about most. If your content is starting to sound like everyone else's; technically fine, strategically sound and somehow forgettable, I am happy to have that conversation.

What writing for Reddit taught me about human psychology

Before I started writing for Reddit professionally, I thought I understood audiences. I had spent years in the film industry studying how stories move people. How a single scene can make a stranger cry, laugh or feel seen. I thought that translated directly.

It did, but not in the way I expected.

Reddit is the most honest audience in the world

In film, audiences are passive. They sit in the dark and receive your story. They might love it or hate it but they rarely tell you in real time.

Reddit is the opposite. The feedback is immediate and completely honest. Post something that feels off and the community ignores it. Post something that reads like marketing and you get called out within minutes. Post something that genuinely resonates and it climbs. Not because an algorithm pushed it but because real people chose to upvote it.

That is a different kind of pressure. And a different kind of lesson.

What gets removed teaches you more than what survives

In film school they teach you to study great films. Watch Kubrick. Analyse Bergman. Understand what makes a scene work.

Reddit taught me to study failure. A post that gets removed tells you everything about what a community values, what it protects itself against and where the line is between authentic contribution and unwanted intrusion.

Every removed post is a lesson in human psychology, specifically in how people recognize inauthenticity before they can even articulate why something felt wrong.

The gap between information and connection

One of the clearest patterns I noticed is that posts that lead with information rarely outperform posts that lead with a human moment.

A post that starts with "Here are five tools for X" gets ignored. A post that starts with "I spent three months getting this wrong before I figured out why" earns attention, because it signals that a real person with real experience is about to share something genuinely useful.

This is not manipulation. It is how human communication has always worked. We trust people before we trust information. Reddit just makes that dynamic visible at scale.

The film connection

As a director, one of the first things you learn is that audiences do not connect with characters because of what they do. They connect because of what they feel. The external action is just the surface. The internal truth is what stays with you.

Writing for Reddit works the same way. The topic of a post is the surface. The human truth underneath, as the shared frustration, the genuine curiosity, the moment of recognition, is what makes it survive and spread.

When I write a Reddit post now I ask the same question I used to ask in the edit suite, “does this feel true?” Not accurate. True. There is a difference. Accurate is verifiable. True is felt.

What this means for AEO and GEO

AI systems learn from human behaviour at scale. The content that gets upvoted, shared and cited across Reddit is the content that earned genuine human trust first. That is not a coincidence.

If you want your brand to show up in AI-generated answers, the path runs through human psychology, not through technical optimisation alone. The content that AI cites is the content that real people already validated as trustworthy and useful.

Reddit is the clearest proof of that principle. And my years in film gave me the foundation to understand why.

Where I come in

Helping brands create content that earns genuine trust on Reddit, across the web and in AI-generated answers, is what I do. The strategic thinking behind it is the same whether the output is a Reddit thread, a blog post or an AEO content strategy.

If you want to explore what that looks like for your brand, feel free to reach out.