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AGAINST THE MEAN

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The hidden danger of AI

What is the hidden danger of AI for marketers and copywriters?

It isn’t em dashes, groups of three, or it’s not x but y. It isn’t even its sycophantic tendencies. You know about those.

It’s outsourcing your ability to judge the quality of your work and the work of others to a machine that has no taste or discernment.

Imagine totalling the number of burgers sold worldwide and finding that McDonald’s burgers are the most prevalent. Because they are the most prevalent, you use them as a template for future good burgers: thin, overcooked meat coasters made to McDonald’s recipe, with slight variations, over and over again.

That is what happens when you trust chatbots to create your content and review the editorial quality of your work.

What do I mean?

Chatbots draw or synthesise words and phrases that are statistically likely to continue the pattern your prompt instigated. That, by its nature, causes patterns heavily represented in their training data to be readily and repeatedly surfaced.

Useful when verifying work against defined, objective, and accessible information. Less so when using a chatbot to create or assess creative copy. It lacks judgement in any human sense and continues the pattern that is most likely rather than most effective.

Without intent, your aged, farm-sourced wagyu beef burger has been judged and found wanting compared to a McDonald’s patty.

Listen to a chatbot often enough without pushing back, including when it disagrees with you, and you’ll find yourself making your own McDonald’s burgers while still extolling the virtues of artisan cuisine.

Repeat across the industry: copywriters, account managers, clients, and founders, each using AI to review strong, deliberate, and human work, and the negative impact compounds.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to trust our taste over a machine’s, listen to our instincts and experience, and leave chatbots to assist with jobs where right and wrong can be objectively defined.

Continue to use them as the arbiter of what good is, and we won’t need to worry about being replaced by AI. We’ll have already adopted its worst traits. We’re better than that. We have more experience than that. We need to remind ourselves of those facts and trust our judgement.

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Make the call and own it

Playwrights and emperors once praised decisiveness and the courage to act.

> “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” — William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

> “Nothing is more difficult, yet more precious, than knowing how to decide.” — Napoleon Bonaparte, as recorded in Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène

I won’t argue that making decisions is easy — far from it. But I will argue that our society attaches status to indecision, as though reaching a conclusion is less sophisticated and less meritorious than hedging, circling back, deferring, or stalling for more time to decide.

British culture now sees something vulgar in decisiveness, something unfair in saying one thing is preferable to another. Yet, we rely on definite judgements when it matters most: A consultant might decide a course of treatment in minutes because the danger of delay outweighs the benefits of deliberation. We trust their skill and experience to know best.

> “You may delay, but Time will not.” — Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved, 1758

The ambient cultural mood is hesitation. We view certainty with suspicion, a remnant of a less tolerant age. Demurring feels progressive and inclusive, particularly when saying what we think could lead to disagreement, a loss of harmony and the social protection it provides.

But time is ticking: on our lives, our loves, our ambitions.

Business too — while co-operation is essential, consensus is not. A strategy’s distinctiveness is often inversely proportional to the number of people involved in devising it. Work regresses to the mean when it passes through multiple inboxes before sign-off. But few people want to make the call, knowing the buck stops with them if things go wrong.

The reasons for indecision — or drawn-out decision-making — may be understandable — human — but understanding them does nothing to improve the results: lives half-lived, cautious and derivative work, metaphorical vanilla as the only flavour on which we can agree.

Thank you, but no.

Be informed, listen to other people, and then trust your knowledge and experience to make the call. Then own what happens, for better or worse.

Because…

> “A life lived in fear is a life half lived.” — Fran, Strictly Ballroom, 1992

Besides, we’ll never build a better world unless people are bold (and foolish) enough to decide to do it.

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