Lived Experience Is the Input AI Can't Fake

The tools that draft a passable LinkedIn post now sit on every marketer's desk, and enough people are running them that a lot of the output reads the same. Once competent content is the floor, the useful question shifts from who can produce it to what makes any single piece worth a reader's attention. That value tends to come from what the writer has seen and done firsthand, the raw material a model pulling from everyone else's data has no way to reach.

Jonathan Frenkel is the CEO of YKC Media, a LinkedIn ghostwriting agency that builds online presence for founders, investors, and executives. He runs it with a small remote team, writes under his own name as a creator, and came up through marketing and early-stage venture before building the agency. His position, the one that drew a round of pushback when he made the case publicly, is that refusing to touch AI has turned into a performance rather than a real edge.

What he keeps returning to is the reader's side of the exchange. "If content is mediocre and hasn't been thoughtfully developed, what separates it from anything else?" says Frenkel. His answer starts with being upfront about how the work actually gets made, and it runs through what he thinks a person still has to put into it.

Scale and the human in the loop

Frenkel runs the agency with a two-person team and a growing roster, and he's plain that serving clients well at that size without AI isn't realistic. "There's no way I can service my clients to the best of my ability without the use of AI," says Frenkel. The setup he describes mirrors the hybrid human-agent model McKinsey lays out, where one person directs the tools that handle execution and spends their own hours on the thinking.

The catch is that clients now expect both things at once. "The expectation is that you're using AI, and the expectation is also that you make it sound human, so there has to be a human in the loop," says Frenkel. He thinks the argument people keep having, over whether or not someone uses the tools, misses where attention is really won. "It's about distribution. That's the game," says Frenkel, who sees the ability to reach and hold an audience as the thing that separates work that travels from content at scale that no one reads.

The input AI doesn't have

The scarce ingredient, in his telling, is the part of a person a model was never trained on. "AI has general knowledge, but it doesn't have your individual experience. Only you can experience that," says Frenkel. He points to the small, specific things: the conference he walked into last week, the person he stood in line next to, the thing he noticed in the room. A model has the collective version of all of it and none of his, and that gap is where he tells clients to build.

The other half is having a point of view worth reading in the first place, which is why he treats AI as a tool rather than a source of ideas. "If you have unoriginal ideas, it doesn't make a difference whether you're using AI or not," says Frenkel. His worry is that competent-but-generic writing is now easy to make and just as easy to skip past, the moment when work starts to blur together. "A lot of people don't have ideas. They're parroting what they're seeing," he says, which puts more weight, not less, on the person supplying the raw thinking.

How the work gets built

His own process starts away from the screen. "I journal in the morning, then I go for a walk and talk into ChatGPT, and I have it take my ideas and organize them," says Frenkel. From there he edits the draft or hands it to his team, keeping it close to the client's voice, with one part he refuses to automate. "I don't ever use AI for the hook. We're in the attention economy, and the hook always has to get attention," says Frenkel, who treats the opening line as the piece of thinking that carries the work.

He frames the finished product as the sum of several hands rather than one prompt. "It becomes three different people writing together," says Frenkel, comparing it to the editors and passes behind any published book. The seed he values most is the least polished input a client can give him. "The best is when I sit down and interview them and they just talk and rant. That's very helpful," says Frenkel, because the unscripted version holds the experience and the ideas that the rest of the process only shapes.