Intentionality and Language
I’m not here to tell you that AI can’t replace a human writer simply because it lacks the life experiences, the happiness, the heartbreaks, the discoveries, and the struggles that shape a person throughout their life. We are already well aware of that.
That’s exactly why I want to go deeper into what being a writer truly means.
Have you ever wondered where your language comes from? Or why English, German, Spanish, Greek, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic all share so many similar words?
If I told you that, according to Norse mythology, the goddess Freyja had two giant golden cats named Bygul and Trjegul, would you be able to guess what those names mean just by speaking English? By (bee) – gul (gold), trje (tree) – gul (gold).
That's no coincidence. All of these languages share the same distant roots, tracing back to a common ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European. Even after thousands of years, that shared origin can still be heard in the words we use every day.
I could spend hours talking about where words come from, how they evolved from Greek, Arabic, or Latin into the words we know and speak today. And that's something AI can't do. It can tell you about the origin of things, about history, or about almost any topic you ask it. But it will never do it with the passion of someone who genuinely loves the subject. It won't weave facts into a story you'll remember, because that's what writing, explaining, and teaching are really about. Without passion, they're just information.
And that's when intentionality and language come into picture. How the words we choose can express feelings and emotions without ever having to state them outright. A message isn't found only in a paragraph, a sentence, or a single line. It's hidden in every word we choose and every tone we adopt. Behind each of them lies a meaning and a feeling.
The birthday message you write to your siblings or friends is not the same as the one you write to someone who doesn’t know they hold a special place in your heart. The words may look similar, but the feeling behind them is completely different.
“Happy birthday. Have a great day, love you.” Can look something entirely different from: “Happiest birthday. Have a wonderful day.” Although the essence of both messages is the same: a simple “You matter to me/I love you.” But only one of them reveals it openly without fear of being rejected, without hiding, and without holding back.
The intentionality in the language is the conscious choice of the right words for each moment, situation, and person. It is the ability to understand that the same message can carry a completely different meaning depending on how, when, and to whom it is expressed. It is something that escapes AI’s understanding. AI will always write with the same structures, the same formulations, and the same patterns of punctuation. It can reproduce information, but it does not truly adapt language through personal intention and emotion. That is why it is often possible to recognize when a text has been written by AI. It’s really easy to see the pattern.
It’s worth nothing.
AI will never understand the emotional weight behind the words: “I just wanted to…”
I just wanted to tell you…
I just wanted to know how you are…
I just wanted to ask how everything is going…
Because behind every “I just wanted to” there is often a much deeper feeling. One that sits heavily in your chest, an “I love you” that fights to come out and keeps choking you until you finally release it. But you know you can’t do it because you fear you’ll be rejected or ignored. You fear the silence that might follow your message. So instead of saying what you truly mean, you hide it behind the innocent disguise of “I just wanted to…” and hope the other person can somehow hear everything you were unable to say.
To write, you have to know first. You have to know yourself, what you feel and how you experience those feelings. You have to know your language: how it was shaped, how it is transmitted, and how to play with it in order to communicate exactly what you mean. Directly, indirectly or through what is left unsaid.
If you don’t know how to do that, maybe you shouldn’t be a writer.
Every person has a unique way of expressing themselves through their voice, their choices, their rhythm, and their words. That is their signature. But if you don’t have one, and what you put onto a page, generated by AI, sounds exactly like thousands of other texts created through the same medium, then you can’t be called a writer.
Sit with this, reflect on it and draw your own conclusions. But above all, keep reading, keep learning, and keep acquiring knowledge because that is the essence of it all.
Without knowledge we’re lost. We’re nothing.
