The Emotional Intelligence Gap in AI Content

In the late 1990, a single book turned the way we look at human intelligence on its head. 

Psychologist and author Daniel Coleman introduced us to “Emotional Intelligence”. His approach was revolutionary and immediately struck a raw nerve with every educational institution in the West. Everyone in academia and even the business world felt they finally found a critical missing link. 

Till then, we measured intelligence with a numerical IQ. A high IQ meant increased chances of success in life. 

Coleman showed that there’s more. The way humans think, deal with crises, and solve problems isn’t determined by IQ alone. His book also offered a completely altered way to understand how intelligence and life skills develop in children and throughout adulthood.

It is not the IQ that determines success or failure and excellence requires more: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE.

Who needs Emotional Intelligence ?

Smart people finally understood why they, too, fail. And not-so-smart people gained hope for personal and professional success. 

I don’t think anyone doubts the book's findings and approach today. 

To illustrate this post, I searched my bookshelf, so I could add a picture of me and the book. But I couldn't find it.  

Was that a coincidence? Or is it symbolic of what is really happening?

Emotional intelligence seems forgotten. No one talks about it anymore. Today we are handing tasks over to agents that have no presence in the physical world, let alone an emotional identity. 

AI can do the math - any math, faster than any human. That makes for tons of valuable uses for artificial intelligence. But there are also endless critical tasks that require the additional ingredient, emotional intelligence, and we shouldn’t trivialize them.

So, let’s dig a little deeper into this.

The binary thinking trap

I asked my assistant Claude to stop writing “it’s not just X, it’s Y”. And it did. 

But I still felt like it wasn’t sincere about it. I couldn’t ditch the sense that all it was doing was finding work-arounds. 

It used longer phrases, different words, altered structures. Bottom line, it still kept starting with a negative statement followed by a positive one that replaced the negative. 

And then it dawned on me: It’s not a structural problem. It’s a thinking problem (yes, I actually wrote that, not Claude).

LLMs are digital tools. Digital technology works on a simple concept with only two variables: 1 and 0.

If it’s not 1, it must be 0. If it’s not 0, it’s 1.

Everything is either 1 or 0 = true or false. 

And Claude confirmed it for me. I confronted it and said “what do I expect, you are a digital brain”. It humbly agreed “You’re right, I use binary concepts”.

Your goals determine which intelligence to apply

Of course there are endless possible 0/1 combinations and that’s what makes things possible. But no matter how you turn it, you need to define for AI precisely what is true and what isn’t. 

The more accurate and detailed our instructions, the better the output. 

But human thinking and intelligence is not binary. The space between 0 and 1,between true and false is huge. And something that is true in some context can be false in a different context. 

Humans use experience and, you guessed it, emotional intelligence to bridge that gap.   

I wonder if digital-based intelligence can ever close the emotional intelligence gap? How many 0/1 combinations will it take to replicate human thinking (if that’s at all possible)?

I don’t know. For now, I know that AI-generated writing maintains a it’s-not-X-it’s-Y framework and if you want something more nuanced you need to involve a human.

If you want to stand out from that, give it to a human who knows how to make the difference.

If you aim to engage your audience, ask a human who can figure out how to reach them emotionally to ‘do their magic’. 

This was the closing sentence on every content brief of a large company whose blog I made successful, “now, do your magic!” 

Is copywriting magic?

I used to say, “it’s not magic,” but maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was their way of telling me, “We can’t grasp how you do it, and even if we understood, we wouldn’t be able to replicate it.” 

I’m talking about smart, capable marketers and managers. 

Great professionals who know how to strategize and conceptualize content, how to research the market, the competition, and the keyphrases for SEO/GEO. They build internal processes that work smoothly, apply effective tools for efficiency, and lead teams to top performance. 

But they did not know how to write to make content perform well. 

That, I learned from successful copywriters only. I studied and practiced the tricks of the magicians before me. The managers didn’t.

If AI is the apprentice, who’s the master?

Now programmers, app builders and web designers are pumping out tools to automate the writing process. Marketers are expected to train AI agents to write scripts and ads and landing pages. 

And it works to a certain point. The research, the concepts, the structures, the priorities, the SEO/GEO, the efficiency, it’s all there. Maybe you’ll get cited, and maybe not.

But what about the magic? That final push that elicits a conversion click. Without a human who has trained emotional intelligence skills to persuade another human, the last mile is lost.

What about consistency in messaging throughout all your content and communication without sounding repetitive? The secret source that makes you recognizable. Without the creative input of a professional wordsmith, you’ll disappear as just another voice in the content crowd. 

Call it magic or call it professional skills, without it, you’ll get mediocracy in all your content. AI can help you produce more social posts and blog articles, videos, slide decks, etc. It will spit out webpage content, landing pages and ads in no time. 

The question is, is tons of fast mediocre content what you need?  

Will this statistically-generated content lead to the results you need to grow your business? 

Can you succeed in marketing without standing out?

I think you know the answer. 

As long as the emotional intelligence gap exists, someone needs to do the magic!

Get a pro to edit, involve a copywriting expert or teach your agents. Or better yet, do both.