Being Human: How Emotional Intelligence is Futureproofing Copywriting

In 2024, this post asked whether AI could out-write a human copywriter, and argued that emotional intelligence was our answer to it. That question has aged out. Drafting is now free, or close enough to it — anyone can generate fluent copy in seconds, in almost any language, in almost any tone you ask for. The interesting question in 2026 isn’t whether a machine can write. It’s what an agency is actually for once it can.

Two things that actually happened

A machine will give you a draft in seconds. It will also, without warning, give you a statistic that was never published, a product that doesn’t exist, or a citation to a paper nobody wrote — fluently, and with total confidence, which is exactly the problem: the failures don’t look like failures. Two recent examples make the shape of the risk concrete.

In October 2025, an Australian consultancy delivered a government report to a federal department for AUD 440,000. It contained fabricated academic references and an invented quotation attributed to a judgment. The final instalment — A$97,000 — was refunded once the fabrications were found.

In May 2025, a syndicated summer reading list ran in several major US newspapers recommending books that don’t exist, confidently attributed to real authors. It traced back to one freelancer’s unchecked AI use, and it ran across multiple titles before anyone caught it.

Notice the shape of that second one. The failure didn’t happen at the publisher — it happened upstream, at a freelancer, and travelled. That is exactly the shape of an agency supply chain, which is why the useful response isn’t a position on the tools. It’s a position on the chain.

What we commit to

We’ve written our full position on this at Written by people, but the short version is four commitments, and each one exists because the alternative has a cost you only discover once:

1. We tell you, in writing, before you sign, where a tool was used and what it did. Disclosure, not just notice — the IPA and ISBA principles say neither side should put AI-generated content in front of the other without agreement, and that’s now written into the standard creative services framework. We work to it.
2. A named person writes it, and a second one reads it. Not a pool, not a rotation — the same writer on your account for as long as you want them, and a review by someone who didn’t write it. For translated work, that second read is a native speaker checking against the source.
3. Every claim traces back to something you gave us. In technical and scientific work, the sentence has to survive a regulatory read. We write from your research, and we can show you where each claim came from.
4. We won’t put a detector score in a warranty. AI-detection tools return meaningful false-positive rates on non-native English and heavily edited prose. Warranting a detector score is warranting a coin toss; we warrant the process instead, because that’s the thing we actually control.

So what is an agency for?

Not the typing. That was never really the scarce part, even before 2023 — a good writer has always spent more time thinking than typing. What’s scarce now is everything a machine can’t be held to: judgement about what to leave out, a named person who will put their reputation behind a sentence, and someone whose job is to notice when a fluent paragraph is quietly wrong. That last one is the whole job, in a way it wasn’t before. Reading for errors used to mean reading for a typo. It now means reading for a plausible-sounding falsehood, which takes a different kind of attention and a genuine understanding of the subject — exactly the thing a generalist tool doesn’t have and a specialist writer does.

There’s a legal wrinkle worth knowing about too, because it affects what you actually own. The US Copyright Office holds that prompts alone confer no human authorship, so copyright may not subsist in a purely machine-generated passage at all. An assignment clause over something uncopyrightable transfers nothing. Our terms assign what can be assigned and grant an irrevocable licence over the rest, which is the drafting the market is converging on — and most suppliers haven’t caught up with it yet.

What we’re not saying

We’re not saying we never touch these tools. We use them the way any competent studio does — research, first-pass structure, terminology checks — and we tell you when we have. What we don’t do is hand you a draft nobody actually wrote and let you find out later, at the worst possible moment, in front of the worst possible audience.

Because that’s the honest cost comparison. Not machine draft versus human draft on price — machine draft versus human draft on what happens the one time in fifty it matters. A refunded fee, a correction notice, a regulator’s letter, a chief executive apologising for copy they were told had been checked. Set against that, the difference between free text and work a person is willing to put their name to isn’t really a line item.

If some of this sounds like it’s aimed at people quietly cleaning up after a year or two of unchecked AI use, that’s because it is. It’s a conversation we have often, and there’s no awkwardness in it — send us the brief and we’ll tell you straight what needs a rewrite and what doesn’t.