When the internet became mainstream and Google really started to take off – about the year 2000 – lots of people turned into Chicken Licken. They ran about the place saying that the sky was about to fall in.

Does that sound familiar with the advent of widely available AI?

When Google search caught on, we all wondered what it would do to employment. Think of all those librarians and researchers. They all lost their jobs en masse, didn’t they? Er… not really.

Take us for instance. We have to do masses of research in our trade. And without Google we wouldn’t have been able to do our job half as well. Seriously.

So as much as it might have taken jobs away, Google also created more jobs than there had been before.

And so to AI. We love it. It doesn’t replace us (although more comment on that in a second). It makes us more efficient, more effective, more profitable.

We use ChatGPT (other generative AI applications are available) like Google on steroids.

But you have to know what you’re looking for in the first place. You have to understand your subject, your sector, your market, your technology. Because to search without context tends to come up with nonsense (at worst) or platitudes (at best).

Take the nature of some feedback that we’ve had from several clients recently.

All of them were getting design and content (text) from a single source. The design was superb. The content was not. Yet they wanted good stuff to amplify through #LinkedIn, the press, web and other channels.

Was it a problem with the copywriters’ style?

No. They wrote fluently and in active accessible language. Really engaging.

Until you realised that what was being said was banal, statements of the obvious, irrelevant, repetitive, skimming the surface.

It wasn’t actually wrong. But it did not put the companies forward in a good light.

Anyone in their target markets would have read this stuff and thought “These people don’t really understand my industry, my markets, our pain-points, how things really work on the ground.”

Oh dear.

So, the client companies were paying good money simply to seem as if they didn’t really understand their customers. Bah!

In one case, I wondered if the agencies in question had been relying too heavily on Chat GPT. So I took the time to get it to write the sections of these content pieces. The output was much the same as had been delivered by the former ‘copywriters’. Staggeringly similar. Fluent banalities. Articulate statements of the obvious. Groovy generalisations.

Makes you wonder if a copywriter had been involved at all.

Anyhow, the client companies weren’t fooled. They didn’t get rid of their content agency. They retained them for creative work (and they’re all VERY good at it too). But they insisted that the core content was split out and handed to us.

Now they not only have properly knowledgeable (and therefore credible) content. They also have recognition from other parts of each of their business, to the extent that colleagues are asking for a similar standard of domain knowledge in their outputs, sometimes taking the good stuff and repurposing for their own product emphases.

So AI can deliver fluency, but it can’t stand out from the crowd. In fact, this output can make a firm look out of touch, unexpert, dumb.

You have to know your subjects – not just gathered from advertising or PR platitudes, but demonstrating in-depth, real-world knowledge of how industries work, where their stresses lie, and how they are addressing them in the field.

We’re not fussed by AI.

Neither should anyone with real knowledge.

But if you don’t really know your subject properly…. WATCH OUT!