Fake or Cake? AI, Corporate Storytelling, and Writing as Empathy

I am building a business around what I'd call my superpower: the ability to write in a way that makes people feel. A storytelling agency that uses written narratives to connect employees, prospects and investors to even the driest and most complex of topics on a human level.

As I map out my business plan, I'm doing what any good marketer would do and spending a disproportionate amount of time on LinkedIn. And then I'm doing what any good business owner would do — getting out and talking to people in industries where this matters most: healthcare, AI, technology, and manufacturing.

But one critical — no, monumental — shift has happened since the last time I found myself in the job market. AI has — on the surface — democratized my superpower.

Or has it?

When I probe the two audiences in my sample study, LinkedIn and IRL, I get two seemingly diametrically opposed arguments.

The LinkedIn Camp

The answer I'm finding on LinkedIn, shaped no doubt by my algorithmic behavior and connection to other writers and comms professionals who find themselves in an existential battle for professional relevance, is a resounding vote of confidence: "of course it's a superpower." And the evidence is mounting on their side.

Recently, publications from the Wall Street Journal to Business Insider have cited the rise of storytellers in corporate America — professionals tasked with creating emotional connections with customers and employees through words. The number of jobs with the title "storyteller" doubled in 2025, while companies from Netflix to Anthropic are hiring senior communications executives commanding upper-six-figure salaries. The rarefied skill they're seeking: the ability to leverage the written word to elicit genuine emotion, to combat the uncanny-valley effect of bot writing and cut through the AI slop.

When Anthropic decided to triple their communications team, they even explicitly forbade applicants from using Claude in the application process. As Chief Communications Officer Sasha de Marigny told Axios: "If I wanted Claude to do the job for you entirely, I would probably just use Claude."

Enter the onslaught of posts and professionals claiming to be BS detectors — those who sniff out AI and catalog its offenses: the em dash (R.I.P.), the incessant "and here's the thing," the construct "it's not X, it's Y," the compounding weight of competent content that says something yet means nothing.

With estimates that over 50% of English-language online content is now AI-generated, professional organizations like Verify My Writing have emerged to certify human authorship. In some ways this reminds me of the True Neapolitan Pizza Association — the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana — which certifies restaurants as authentically Neapolitan based on strict rules.

But the argument here isn't just about purism. AI-generated writing is mediocre by design — it pulls from the mean, and when the sample set is twenty years of internet content, you get a lot of C-level work. Does the job but is rarely good. Like bowling alley pizza when we could be having a fresh slice from a brick oven.

The IRL Camp

The conversations I'm having with people IRL tell a different story.

On one hand there are the early AI-adopters — professionals who need to write but don't view it as part of their identity. They tend to flex how they load up their LLMs with writing samples until the agents produce copy that sounds just like they do. On the other hand, there are time-pressed realists, usually business owners, who accept that the output is 80% as good as a human but that the other 20% isn't worth the time or resource investment.

Perhaps the most conclusive evidence for this side came recently from the most unlikely source. In The New York Times piece "Who's a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans?", a blind test found that 54% of readers selected AI-generated writing over human writing when asked which passage was clearer — across genres from poetry to sci-fi.

Worth noting: popular discourse has interpreted this as readers preferring AI writing, which conflates clarity with quality. James Joyce was not celebrated because Ulysses is an easy read. Clarity and resonance are not the same thing.

The Value of Authenticity

The online debate about whether AI can write good — and whether humans can even tell — is really a debate about the nature of authenticity. Is it origin-based or effect-based? Origin-based asks: did a human write this? Effect-based asks: does it feel real?

Which side you land on tells you something about how you think about authenticity, and I'd wager it correlates with how you feel about superfake handbags. If the craftsmanship is indistinguishable, does the origin still matter? For some people, absolutely. For others, the effect is the point.

Eventually, AI will get as good as a superfake handbag and the words it strings together will, for all intents and purposes, be indiscernible from human writing. In a mass exchange of written content, the objective differences will carry the intellectual rigor of an episode of Fake or Cake?

But there is one critical — no, again, monumental — difference. A difference that will shape how we work together as colleagues, how we connect with each other as humans, and how we contribute value to our businesses, communities and society.

And that's the presence of the soul.

Writing as Empathy

I'll be honest — I'm an origin person. Fake handbags give me the ick. I'm a little judgy when I smell OpenAI in someone's writing (Claude gets a pass). I edit my drafts for em dashes just so people know the first version was written character by character on an actual keyboard by yours truly.

Which is probably why a recent conversation with a close friend felt like a punch in the gut.

She's a Senior HR leader — but not “a regular HR leader.” She's a people-first, eloquent powerhouse, the kind of person you name CPO, not CHRO. Her superpower is communication with empathy, and when she asked me, genuinely: "do people really care if I used AI or not?" — my heart sank.

I realized: while strategists and marketers have been having the authenticity debate online, we've lost sight of why we write, and why we read, in the first place. We write not to flex our authority or our skill but to relate. To make our reader feel. We write from our soul, that inaccessible part of our minds, to share it a little bit with another. We read not just to consume information, but to feel seen. To find ourselves in the reflection of another.

In a business context, that means using communication to build community. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, a bot-written restructuring announcement is about as appealing as cardboard shaped like Wheaties. It doesn't just lack authority, credibility, or aura. It destroys the very basis of culture, corporate trust, in ways that take years to rebuild.

In her latest work on psychological safety, Professional coach Dr. Shelley Reciniello reminds her business readers that empathy is "imagination in the realm of feeling" — the act of letting someone else's reality genuinely inhabit your mind. Writing, at its best, is the act of translating that feeling into words precise enough to recreate it in someone else. Every word chosen encapsulates an amorphous impulse. Every sentence is an attempt to string those impulses into a cogent feeling that, when transmitted, is the ultimate act of empathy. A sharing of soul.

Every technological advancement in written communication — from the pen to the typewriter to the computer — has compressed the time we spend in that imaginative, empathetic state. We write faster. We linger on word choice less. It's why a handwritten letter still carries so much meaning: we spend more time suspended in the act of relating.

AI compresses that time — time spent imagining the feelings of your reader — to zero.

When President Obama was in office, he chose ten letters each night to read from constituents directly, refusing his staff's offer to summarize them. Because word choice mattered. Sentence cadence mattered. The act of reading kept him tethered to the specific felt reality of someone else's life.

So Does It Matter?

It depends entirely on why you're communicating.

If you're writing to check a box  — to generate a job description, to produce a technical document — AI is a reasonable tool for the job. No one is arguing that a tech brief needs aura or that a contract is an exercise in empathy.

But I'm building a business on the bet that Communications is about more than checking boxes. We write to build communities, to share our values, to lead people through uncertainty, to make our customers feel seen.

And when we choose to work with a business, it's rarely a logical decision made with a pros and cons list: the world is too messy, markets too saturated, and human beings too complex for that.

We choose the companies that make us feel seen, our pain feel heard, our humanity feel recognized. Because of that line that made us chuckle over morning coffee. Because of that relatable story that sparked our own moment of recognition. Because in an increasingly remote, isolated world, we felt a little less alone. And a little more nourished.

When I'm spoken to, when I read, when I engage with a business article or idea — I don’t just want to consume the content.

I want to feel the fears, emotions, desires, dreams and experience of the people creating.

Your reader, your employee, your prospect, your customer — they do too. They want cake.