It�s Beginning To Look A Lot Like AI-Generated Content

12 months ago 56

I�ve been thinking lately about an observation from Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard: �Advertising has a bad reputation as a content crap trap �� In this digital age we�re producing thousands of new ads, posts, tweets,...

I�ve been thinking lately about an observation from Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard:

�Advertising has a bad reputation as a content crap trap ��

�In this digital age we�re producing thousands of new ads, posts, tweets, every week, every month, every year. We eventually concluded all we were doing was adding to the noise.�

Marc shared this conclusion way back in 2016 at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference, years before the ChatGPT era promised to turbocharge content creation. �

The advent of AI-generation by itself doesn�t fix the �content crap trap� conundrum.� If anything, AI tools alone risk making the problem worse.

I like how Ian Whitworth once described AI-Generated Content as �infinite words nobody wants.�

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Like any tool, it�s all in how we use it.� AI tools are often presented and marketed as a magic wand icon: type a few words, tap a button, and �automagically� generate a post, an ad, an article, an image, whatever. �

But the first output by default is a great averaging (or as Ian Whitworth said, �a great same-ening�) of what has already been created.� We have to learn to balance human creativity with AI efficiency if we want to do more than just add to the noise.�

We can�t expect to break through the clutter by adding to it.

As ex-Google product manger Pedro Dias observed in the context of SEO results:

�Your site didn�t get penalized because you used AI for your content.

�Your site got penalized because the way you used AI, and the output of your AI, was crap.�

Here are a few other cartoons I�ve drawn about Christmas over the years: