Mind Readings: AI Creative Work is a Marketing Problem

I have seen this meme floating around now on LinkedIn and Threads and a bunch of other places. And the meme goes, I want AI to do my chores so that I can be creative. I don't want AI to be creative so that I'm doing even more chores. And I get that. It makes total sense.

I understand where people are coming from on that. But AI is not the problem here. I have lost count of the number of people who have reacted negatively, in some cases very outrageously so, to creative pieces made with AI, from the Toys R Us commercial to other images, video, music, etc. And I won't repeat any of them because I mean it's going to violate various terms of service on whatever platform I share this on in very colorful ways based on the language people use. But the gist is this people are saying, hey, I should do the boring stuff, not the fun stuff.

Why are we taking the fun stuff away from people and leaving them with the boring stuff? Let's have some honest talk here. First, at a personal level, at an individual human level, outside of work and outside of organizations, absolutely no one is saying you should be giving up what your creative outlets. No one is saying hand off all your hobbies to machines. Do what makes you happy.

If you love to paint, if you love to draw, if you love to make music, do that. Absolutely do that. Keep doing that. Pretend AI doesn't even exist. It should not be a factor in what you enjoy doing.

Second, in the workplace, if you work for a company that mandates that the creative tasks you do be handed off to machines, you gotta ask why. Why? Why does the company think that's a good idea? We know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, we know that today's models and today's technologies cannot create content as good as the best human. If you go to a tool like Suno, which I've been playing around with a lot, is a music creation software.

It creates anywhere from okay to to pretty okay to to good music. It's not great. It's not going to win a Grammy. It's not something that's gonna make you go, oh my gosh, I've never heard anything like that. That is so phenomenal.

I'm gonna listen to this all the time and nothing else. Now, it makes good music. Why do I use it? Because this human can't make music at all. So it fills a skills gap for me.

But in no way am I ever representing, like, I'm a musician now. No, I'm I'm AI, I am an AI expert who can use AI generation tools, but I am not a musician by any stretch of the imagination. In the workplace, what is it that a company that says, hey, you've got to replace all this stuff with AI? What is it that the company values that makes them think this is a good idea? There's three things we all want, right?

Fast, cheap, good. That's it. And and the the joke is, you know, choose choose any two. The thing with machines is you don't have to. So what is it about the creative task that a company is looking at?

Is it speed? Is it cost? Is it quality? I understand, and you probably too, if we're honest, uh, why someone would make that decision about uh about turning things around. I was talking to um this one company, and they were saying, yeah, you know, for for getting this blog post into production, uh, because of our workflow and processes, it's gonna take four to six weeks to get it um drafted and handed off to a contractor and then brought back in and approved and all that stuff like six weeks for a 300-word blog post, and I can go to Gemini or Claude and whatever, and get four and knockoff for the six weeks by writing a halfway decent prompt.

In that case, the company values speed, and the current all human setup can't deliver on that speed. The machine can. There's a cost too. I had a client years ago now that was paying $150 per 700-word blog post. And the content that the freelancers were writing, because they they they use contractors outside contractors, was okay.

Wasn't great, wasn't gonna win them any awards, wasn't particularly insightful. They gave they came up with a list of okay topics, and the the contractors wrote okay content. You can do the exact same thing with generative AI today and not pay $150 per 700 words. If a company values cost, there's a reason for that. Here's the thing the ugly truth is that if a company sees AI output as worth replacing human output, they value something different than you than you do.

They value speed at a much greater premium, and they're willing to accept lower quality in exchange for higher speed, or they value cost and they're willing to trade lower quality for higher for more savings. That's not an AI problem. That is a marketing problem. Why is it a marketing problem? Because as creators, we are not marketing the value of human-led content.

What is it about human-led content that you believe is more valuable to your buyer, the company you work for than AI? How are you marketing that special intent, that special value, that the thing that makes it better than machine-made content? How are you reinforcing the value, showcasing that value? And are you showcasing the results? To say, here's a human-led piece, here's an AI-led piece.

The human-led piece drove more leads or earned more revenue or something. What is it you can say? Yeah, this is the reason to use humans because they're better at this result than the machine. Can you demonstrate that? Can you demonstrate that human output outperforms AI content?

I had a really uncomfortable conversation not too long ago with a client. We did an A-B test of human-led content versus AI-generated content. And in the KPIs the client cared about, this was an SEO thing. This was the the outcome was traffic. The AI content beat the human-led content three to one.

Three to one. This isn't, again, this is not an AI problem. This is a marketing problem and possibly a product problem. If the humans can't generate better quality content than the machine, the rational choice is to choose the machine. The rational, sensible choices in that example, especially is to choose the machine.

It was faster, it was cheaper, and it was better. And by better, we mean delivered on the KPIs the client cared about. You solved for AI by being better than AI, generating better results than AI. No one, no one's replacing Han Zimmer with a prompt, right? No one's gonna swap out Han Zimmer for a Sunotrack anytime soon.

No one's replacing Amanda Gorman with a language model. No one is putting up their Picasso for sale, you know, fire sale on eBay to replace them with AI generated variants. No one's doing that. Because those examples are people who are better than AI. Are you better than AI?

Am I better than AI? That is the challenge before us. We solve the challenge of machines replacing by humans by being better than machines, by consistently delivering on the ways that our clients and our stakeholders value in demonstrable, measurable, quantifiable ways to say, hey, yes, this human-led thing does a better job. Here's the results. Here's how much more money it made us.

Companies care about saving time, saving money, and making money. If you can showcase measures, quantified measures that say, yes, this is better. I am making you more money with human-led content. There will not be a discussion about AI. AI will fall by the wayside because people are like, no, I want more money.

Let's use humans. The challenge is a lot of the argument and conversation about AI, the data isn't there. The data isn't there for someone to say, yes, I can do this better than a machine. We don't have good measures typically of revenue, but we absolutely have measures of operational efficiency and quality. Are you faster and better than a machine?

That is the question to answer. That's going to do it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you on the next one. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't already.

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