ChatGPT, please write me the first paragraph of a blog post, about how AI is dominating content across professional platforms and CRM campaigns. Keep this fairly short.
Artificial Intelligence is transforming the way businesses approach content creation, rapidly becoming the backbone of professional platforms and CRM campaigns. From generating personalized marketing emails to crafting insightful thought leadership pieces, AI enables organizations to deliver tailored, data-driven content at scale. This shift isn’t just about efficiency—it’s reshaping how brands connect with their audience, creating more meaningful and impactful interactions across every touchpoint.
And this is what I want to talk about, from blog posts and newsletters, to keynote titles along with their descriptions and LinkedIn posts, perfectly phrased sentences are everywhere, and are very often slightly longer than they need to be…
ChatGPT, please enhance the above sentence for me:
This is precisely what I want to explore: from blog posts and newsletters to keynote titles, descriptions, and LinkedIn updates, eloquently crafted and impeccably phrased sentences dominate—often with a tendency to stretch just a bit longer than necessary.
After all, how can I compete with the literary craftsmanship and dominance of the above? How can I, not just read all the best content, but also remember everything I learn? From Hemingway’s admirable ability to be direct but also descriptive thanks to his time as a journalist, to Kafka’s emotional skepticism born of his anti-establishment views and personal insecurities. And that’s not even to mention the probably twelve minutes it took me to research the above reference. Wouldn’t it have been easier to ask AI?
Competing with something as meticulously crafted as AI feels like an uphill battle. To even stand a chance, I’d need to absorb the entirety of literature—from the razor-sharp wit and brevity of Oscar Wilde to the sweeping, evocative prose of Gabriel García Márquez. And let’s not forget mastering the art of conciseness and rhythm, à la Hemingway. Incidentally, researching that last sentence took me so long that I might have aged a decade—and I’m still not sure I’ve done them justice.
I think we all agree, as much as Love in the Time of Cholera is one of my favourite books, and despite soakig up as much of Shelley as I could when I was a teenager, AI wins every time. So why wouldn’t we turn to it for that latest LinkedIn announcement that we’re going to be attending ICE, to write a recommendation letter for a colleague or to draft a PRD? I think there a few reasons.
If we’re all the best, then we’re all the same. If we all write “à la” an outstanding writer, then we’re all, at our core, proxy surrogates doing the work of our AI hosts. Ok, that sounds way more dramatic than it needs to be, but AI wouldn’t have made that mistake, AI also wouldn’t (yet) have the conscience to realise it’s a little dramatic for the context it’s in. But that’s what makes us human. We don’t learn in a vacuum until we’re a refined MVP ready to be released into the world to iterate as an agile driven product ready to be refined with every release cycle; but rather we learn on the go, we make mistakes on the go and we many a times have to fix them as opposed to just learn what we did wrong and know not to do that again.
Our content would also be soulless in the most soulful way possible. It would be a neon light advertising your home poker game in the middle of the Las Vegas strip, where everything is neon. Nothing will be yours anymore, but rather the result of your best instruction to AI in what will essentially be a prompt war of content creation.
I also believe, by expecting people to read something that is AI generated, we are unintentionally insulting their intelligence. Last year I was a guest on a panel which had very clearly used AI to write it’s panel titles and descriptions. Whomever was responsible for writing these descriptions did not realise that AI has a tendency to provide an overload of information, which stems from a bias toward over-explaining rather than risking leaving gaps that could be misinterpreted as a lack of understanding or detail. A human understands what their readership likely knows and doesn’t know, and through data businesses understand their demographic’s needs better than anyone else, including AI. Thus, AI-splaining something to someone which they already understand is neither helpful, nor conducive to an enjoyable shopping, browsing, buying, scrolling or learning experience.
For over a year now, I have maintained a policy which I have applied to myself and my teams in regard to using AI in business, and that is the following: use AI to the fullest extent of it’s capabilities, right up until it becomes more of a burden than a benefit. It’s easy to write an extensive list of gherkin scenarios for a PRD in a day, but they’re unlikely to be relevant to what you want to develop, you can write a UX brief using solely ChatGPT, but it’s unlikely to tackle the core problems you need to solve, and you could obviously knock up a press-release that sounds like it’s come from Matthew Freud himself, but it not likely to contain the actual meat and potatoes of what you want to say (as you can tell I don’t have Matthew Freud’s writing talent!). My rule of thumb is this: if someone can tell you’ve used AI, then you likely haven’t used it properly.
As a footnote to this post, I pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to suggest a title, and it came back with ‘When AI Writes, Do We Lose Our Voice? Balancing Creativity and Efficiency in the Age of Automation’. I think this illustrates so many facets of my point perfectly.
No responses yet