Column: Can AI and creativity coexist?

We’ve all seen the posts floating around the internet about ChatGPT. Some harken to the second coming of intelligent life, with the pithier amongst us turning their noses up in unbridled disdain at its fumbling attempts at creativity.

I’d been introduced to a similar tool earlier this year - one I won’t name, but fairly consistent with what we're seeing splayed across socials. Much glossier, sharp, and has nice aesthetics. Definitely piqued my interest.

I was curious as to how this might fit into the modern-day marketer's toolkit.

In my mind, the argument has always been that AI and robots will take over the menial tasks, freeing up our much superior brains for the higher level of thinking, processing and analysis required to identify and connect with our customers. To dig deeper and uncover those motivations we can use to understand their core problems, the solving of which power our own businesses.

This kind of creativity will never be replaced.

To test if that was true, in my own academically unrigorous way, over the last few months I thought I’d test this theory out. As someone who dabbles in the written word from time to time, I didn’t feel so much threatened by what I had seen, but curious as to how these shiny new tools can perhaps help relieve the burden of generating mass copy.

Are the robots coming for our jobs?

I aimed to find out.

Create Amazing

The tool I was using billed itself as the ‘AI Content Platform’ that helps ‘break through creative blocks to create amazing, original content 10X faster.’ The ads kept popping up in my feed and while I don’t like to reward retargeting campaigns, it was using a number of other channels so felt like the right one to trial.

I coughed up for the paid account. It wasn’t the cheapest option, but also not anywhere near the highest. There were enough tools and options to give me a good feel for the system, without sending me bankrupt for a mere experiment.

At first impression, the overall system was pretty slick. Great interface, and intuitive tools. Pretty straightforward. Was churning out characters in seconds. Absolutely no barriers to getting started other than a bit of familiarisation with the tools and process.

For what I was paying, felt like a fair deal.

The email marketing was pretty unrelenting and clearly identified by the sender as predominantly AI-generated. I’m a firm believer in eating your own lunch - using your own expertise to sell your expertise - but this felt a bit distant for a new user trying to get to grips with the platform.

I also joined the creator community on Facebook. While it was easy to get started, I wanted to make sure I was giving it a fair go and not blaming outputs on my own ineptitude. While there was plenty of help to be found, the comments were so sickeningly sycophantic in their praise, I assumed the group was populated with bot accounts spewing forth manufactured adulation.

Maybe that was the case, but judging by the reactions on other platforms to the likes of ChatGPT, perhaps not.

SEO Magician

I repeatedly asked for examples of outputs from the sycophants, so I could compare quality, but my requests fell on deaf ears. One user did end up responding privately to identify the brands they write for, but not the outputs. When pressed, he said "nobody wants to reveal their niche and sites, for obvious reasons."

The obvious reasons, he explained, was the level of competition in SEO writing. "People always go to sites and copy content or extract keywords", he said. "Or copy the whole niche".

Without one hint of irony, having procured all of his content from a source stripping content and keywords from across the web.

Which way to Centrelink?

So are the robots coming for my job?

As sceptical as I was going in, the outputs weren’t bad. Paragraphs were legible and could be structured in a way to reveal something tangible. With a heavy dose of guidance.

The community is pretty robust, with plenty of support available full of tutorials, prompts, commands and other features to help get the most out of the tool.

I spent very little time generating each piece - by design - but I'm sure with a little more effort, these tools could be used to speed up a lot of copy output.

Beau Ushay is a marketing specialist at Virtual Marketing Management. Connect with him on LinkedIn.