Everyone’s talking about it. AI writing your content for you, your blog running on autopilot, you sipping coffee while the machine does the work. I wanted to try it. For real.
Result: PSG had enough time to win their second Champions League. Me? I’ve got a folder called “To publish” with ten articles in it. Zero live.
May. Heatwave. The plan of the century.
32 degrees in my office. Paris melting. Me in front of my screen with a bulletproof plan.
I ask Claude to generate ten topics. Ten outlines. Ten full articles. I bulk-validate, schedule, move on. Total automation. The blog runs itself.
By the end of the evening I had everything. Ten clean, well-structured articles, right length. Honestly impressive.
And then. Nothing.
The problem is the proofreading
Because proofreading an article you didn’t write is tedious. Really tedious.
You’re not building something. You’re in audit mode. You read every sentence wondering if that’s really how you would have said it. Usually the answer is no. So you edit. Then you edit again. And at some point you close the tab.
The next day you have the same conversation with yourself. And the day after that too.
The real bug
I had outsourced my thinking before doing any thinking.
That’s the thing. AI starts from nothing if you give it nothing. I had only given it topics. Not my opinion on them. Not the anecdote that makes the topic interesting. Not the reason I actually wanted to write about it that evening.
So the texts were technically correct. But they looked like articles without quite being articles. Well written. Empty.
Terminator. Half human, half machine.
What I do now is different. And less glamorous to talk about.
I read things. Articles, studies, LinkedIn posts that annoy me. I form an opinion. Sometimes I disagree with what I read, sometimes it confirms what I already thought. Only then do I open Claude.
I share my sources. I share my point of view. We debate. I say “no, you’re going too far there” or “yeah, that’s exactly it.” The AI structures, rephrases, suggests angles. I make the calls.
The final article is a bit like Terminator. There’s machine in there, no denying it. But the skeleton is me. The point of view is me. The reason it exists is me.
And that changes everything. Because when I proofread, I recognise my own way of thinking. I correct the tone, not the substance. Ten times faster.
What I figured out too late
AI doesn’t fix a consistency problem. It just reveals why you had one.
If your blog isn’t moving forward, it’s rarely a tools problem. It’s that you haven’t decided what to say yet. Or you don’t really want to say it. Or you have other things going on and the blog is a good intention waiting its turn.
Total automation is an elegant way to avoid those questions.
Mine are waiting in a folder. Ten articles. Still there.
At least this one made it out.