Imagine the year 2005. Chess engines finally solved the game, meaning a computer could effortlessly calculate moves that would crush the greatest human grandmasters. You might assume people would just pack up their boards, realizing they could never compete with a machine. Instead, human chess exploded in popularity. Today, hundreds of millions of people play online. The game became more popular than ever because people do not play chess to be perfect, they play it for the love of the challenge.
I was reminded of this fascinating dynamic when I read a brilliant post from a French AI professional today. This creator writes for hundreds of thousands of readers, teaching them how to navigate artificial intelligence without feeling overwhelmed. Yet, despite being deeply embedded in the tech space and knowing exactly how capable these models are, the author refuses to let AI write his posts.
The Automation Boundary
The author points out a hard truth about content creation. Anyone using AI to instantly write and schedule a hundred social posts never really wanted to write in the first place. They just wanted the engagement, the return on investment, and the shortcuts. For most business tasks, those shortcuts are exactly what you need.
This savvy professional uses AI for almost everything else in his workflow. He leans on it heavily for accounting, legal contracts, financial planning, and summarizing hundreds of daily research papers. For those tasks, he just wants the rapid results.
But when it comes to writing, he draws a hard line. Writing, he explains, is how he processes information. It is how he thinks and understands. Outsourcing that process would mean outsourcing his own cognitive development. He notes that both reading and writing are fundamental acts of understanding. Just as an AI memorizing a book does not mean you have read it, an AI writing an article does not mean you have shared your expertise.
The Sunday Stress Test
To keep himself grounded, the expert runs a fascinating experiment every single week. When his token limits reset on Sunday afternoon, he pushes his AI tools to the absolute maximum. He fires up Claude Code alongside Opus 5.5 and prompts the system to completely replace him.
Here is the exact prompt he uses to test the system’s limits:
“You know my newsletter, how-to-ai.guide. Write the next article, do the research, take all of the necessary screenshots in the right software (using computer use), add the orange rectangles and arrows the same way I do it, and make sure to use the same style and verbatim as me”.
The results are incredibly polished. The AI mimics his visual style, matches his formatting, and sounds highly professional. But the author notes that something vital is always missing from the final output.
The Value of Scars
The AI version lacks the scars of human effort. When humans build something or write about a complex topic, we bump into problems. We make mistakes, figure out workarounds, and share those messy lessons. An AI simply generates the perfect path, skipping the struggle that actually teaches the reader how to avoid pitfalls.
The creator also points out that his native French brain makes tiny translation quirks when writing in English. He occasionally misses the perfect native idiom, resulting in a slightly quirky tone. His readers actually appreciate this authenticity because it proves a real human is behind the keyboard.
Where to Draw the Line
Based on this insightful post, here is how you can balance automation and authenticity in your own workflow:
- Automate the mundane tasks where you only care about the final result, like data entry or summarizing long documents.
- Protect the processes that help you think, such as reading, brainstorming, and writing core concepts.
- Embrace your unique imperfections, because those quirks are exactly what algorithms cannot replicate.
Why it matters: AI can give you incredible shortcuts, but you cannot outsource your passions or your critical thinking without losing the very essence of what makes your work valuable to others.
I highly recommend checking out the full LinkedIn post to read his complete thoughts on preserving human creativity in an automated world.