Nick Usborne

In a world of AI-generated marketing, where’s the Creative Director?

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creative director and team

As a budding young copywriter in the early 1980s, I worked with an art director as my partner, and our work was overseen by the agency’s creative director.

Creative directors were at the top of the pile in Creative Departments. They were the best of the best, and inspired the work of everyone. They shaped the overall creative output of the agency. They also used their experience and judgement to decide whether any particular piece of work was good enough.

In my early days, the creative director would look over my shoulder and sometimes say something like, “Interesting idea, but I don’t think it’s working”. Or, “Bit of a second rate headline, Usborne. Try again.”

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How to be more collaborative when working with AI.

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collaborating with AI

Much of the time, we use tools like ChatGPT to answer questions.

Search engines like Google have trained us for decades to interact with the internet in this question-and-answer format.

“Where can I find the best price for an all-inclusive vacation in Cancun?”

“How do I make coffee with a percolator?”

We bring those same habits to models like ChatGPT, or hybrid tools like Perplexity.ai.

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Be the Human In The Loop… And dramatically increase your value as a freelancer.

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t-shirt with logo saying I am the human in the loop

You have a lot of choices when using AI to write copy and content.

First, you can choose between the major Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude3 and others.

Then you have dozens, if not hundreds of new AI-writing platforms, most of which are using these models as the engines that drives them.

It’s little wonder the web is being flooded with new AI content, most of it sounding like it was written by a well-meaning robot.

The content isn’t badly written. With some decent prompts, most of these tools will give you a very passable first and second draft.

But there IS a problem.

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What if Sam Altman is only half right about AI doing 95% of your work?

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Kyodo Photo via Credit: Newscom/Alamy Live News

This is what Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in an interview last fall:

“It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI — and the AI will likely be able to test the creative against real or synthetic customer focus groups for predicting results and optimizing. Again, all free, instant, and nearly perfect. Images, videos, campaign ideas? No problem.”

To put this into context, he’s not talking about GPT-4 or the upcoming GPT-5. He’s talking about when AI achieves Artificial General Intelligence, AGI.

AGI is broadly defined as the stage at which an AI model gains enough skills to perform any task that humans can do, with equal or better proficiency.

We’re not there yet.

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AI can’t shake with anger, tremble with fear, or burst into tears.

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Emotions don’t happen just in our minds.

Emotions stimulate physiological responses… like changes in heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, facial expressions, and muscle tension.

These physical responses are mediated by the autonomic nervous system, and the release of hormones.

Long story short… any emotion you feel is accompanied by a physical response.

As humans, we live, touch and breathe emotions.

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Why use AI writing tools like ChatGPT when you can do better work on your own?

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The question in the headline was asked by a good friend, and highly-regarded copywriter.

It’s a totally legitimate question. As professional copywriters we can write better than any AI, and we naturally infuse our work with emotion… because we know it works.

So… if we can do all that on our own, why do I recommend that people dive into AI, use tools like ChatGPT, and then infuse the AI output with Emotional Intelligence?

Why make it complicated? Why not just carry on as normal?

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