Do androids dream of AI marketing campaigns?

Have you scrolled through LinkedIn in the last week?

Have you considered whether what you’re reading was written by a human or a computer?

And more importantly, could you tell the difference?

Would it not be incredibly ironic if this introduction was generated by ChatGPT?

We get it, the temptation is there. Should I spend an hour churning out an article, or have it written for me in seconds, with maybe 15 minutes of editing and personalisation, before calling it a day?

OK, that’s the rhetorical question portion of our evening over with… or is it?

As marketers, AI is at the forefront of every conversation right now. By the week, it’s only becoming more sophisticated, more celebrated, and more feared. Once you’ve studied it enough, you begin to see telltale signs of an AI piece of writing. The overuse of emojis, bullet point lists, titles like “what watching Cars 2 with my son taught me about B2B sales”, or using ridiculous hypothetical scenarios to make a point – if you come across of these, I would hedge my bets that they weren’t lovingly crafted by a person with a burning topic on their mind, but spat out via a quick prompt by someone looking for some relatable content.

Let the record show that I type this without a hint of judgment. I’d be lying if I said we haven’t used AI as a jumping-off point for a piece of writing or for some quick idea generation, but to go further than that would be the antithesis of everything we see as marketing.

When reading this, don’t think of Nike or Disney as the type of brands I’m talking about; think of an upstart business, a small family-run company, or a charitable organisation working in a saturated market or fighting against all the odds. They need to stand out from the crowd with a personality that speaks to customers individually, addressing their needs, wants, and concerns. AI, try as it might, cannot understand those experiences to suitably talk about them in a way customers can connect with.

It’s like the “Infinite Monkey Theorem”. In the same way infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters will never be able to reproduce the works of Shakespeare, infinite AI prompts will never be able to capture the wit, warmth, quirks or cadence of a real person (I’ll revisit this in five years to see just how wrong I am).

Remember, AI cannot produce new content; it is simply an amalgamation of everything that came before it, and as more AI content is spewed online, we end up with replicas of replicas of replicas, like a dotty jpeg that’s been reuploaded to within an inch of its life.

Humans are messy, we make spelling mistakes and sometimes ramble aimlessly, but on any given day, it trumps the formulaic, data-driven approach of AI. Sit down and type up a single page of A4 on any topic you’re interested in, infuse it with your own personality and style, then try to get AI to replicate that and, given our experiences with this exact same task, we’re confident that it can’t.

We’re so bombarded with content on a day-to-day basis that potential customers have most likely already seen fifteen “innovative” products before they’ve seen yours or been invited to seven events where they can “network with like-minded professionals, contributing to the future of your industry” before they’ve seen yours. AI picks from a word cloud of regurgitated corporate buzzwords because that’s its source of information, realistically giving you a chance to rise above it and be seen amongst the drudgery.

My hope, after giving me five minutes of your time, is that you’ll reconsider using ChatGPT the next time writing an article makes its way onto your to-do list, and that you’ll try to actively asses the content you consume, searching for those sometimes imperceptible signals that what you're enjoying might not have come from the fingers of a writer, but a server somewhere in San Francisco.

Besides the creative implications, it’s also actively destroying the planet - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/30/ugly-truth-ai-chatgpt-guzzling-resources-environment