Does using AI for creative work lead mean a trade-off for quality and impact? 1440’s Guy Corbet explores.
I was lucky enough to spend my formative years in public relations and marketing at the leading agency of its day. I got to learn at the feet of giants.
Surrounded daily by the best people in the business, every internal meeting or chat in the smoking room was an education. Watching the principals work their magic to help clients improve their business performance was formative.
One of my mentors used to explain the secret of our success by saying that for us “good enough isn’t good enough”. For other agencies it was, but we were only interested in doing the best possible.
All of which makes for an interesting collision with AI as it becomes increasingly central to our lives. I was recently at an industry talk when the discussion focused on understanding what clients really want to achieve. Are they happy with “good enough”? Is that the low bar to start with, or the height of their expectations?
Put simply, if good enough is the highest goal then, perhaps, the work can be delivered by piling it high and selling it cheap. Keep everything crossed that it plays well in the market. Use AI as much as possible. Make sure you fact check it. Properly. Then double check.
But leave it to do what it’s good at: adding the client’s brand to the tallest part of the bell curve.
For businesses which believe that good enough isn’t, that it is the bare minimum in their goal to do great work to maximise its impact, then AI may still be part of the picture. For real differentiation human craftsmanship endures.
In practice the difference between the two approaches is often the cost of human intervention. That human craftsmanship takes time, which costs money. Though the prospects of a return are far greater.
Sometimes the rigours of fact checking may make the AI-only approach a false economy, though that doesn’t have to be the case.
The choice doesn’t need to be “either or”. The best approach to creating smart content is to blend human understanding to build the core story. Then let the machines slice and simplify when it comes to execution.
And AI research at the outset can be much quicker and richer than spending hours grinding though the traditional Google searches to find information to inform the insight.
The key is to be clear with clients about what their brand and business expects in terms of quality and results. And that they get the quality they are seeking, whether the strength of the ideas, or of the strategy shaping them.
For all that we are seeing the rise of the machines, it is also clear that when it comes to business performance and campaign impact, good enough isn’t.