Should you use AI to create content?

Welcome to a special evening edition of PROse, where we explore the science behind building a brand.

In today’s email, we discuss:

• The importance of having taste & creativity

• Using AI for content generation

• Using AI for content ideation & research

Yo! I’m Darien from Antidote 👋🏾. Every week I share what I learn about the science of building a brand. If someone forwarded this email to you or you’re reading this online, welcome to the fold! What you're about to read is an unconventional view on B2B marketing.

If you enjoy it, join 100s of other B2B marketers on the journey to build a standout brand.

AI has entered its “NFT Craze” phase. Every day, a new AI tool pops up or a legacy brand is introducing AI to its product suite.

Is AI a bubble? I have serious doubts about 99% of the AI tools since the vast majority seem to be features (literally), not products. But I don’t think the entire category or technology is going to disappear.

So if it’s not going to disappear, should you be using it? And if so, how? That’s a question I’m getting weekly now. Let’s work through some frameworks together.

The role of taste & creativity in marketing

“Creativity is the variable to success”. If success was a formula it might look something like this:

(Hard work + Persistence) x Y = Success, where Y is the “amount” of creativity applied to the activity.

As a marketing team, you can work harder (in the form of doing more things) and longer than all your competitors. But if they have orders of magnitude more creativity than you, they’ll probably beat you at owning mindshare in your category. Android vs. Apple is a great example of this.

Taste and creativity are the highest leverage skills for a marketing team. That may get pushback as some might say it’s something else (e.g. analytics or forecasting). Those things are important too, but you’re a marketer - your job is to attract people to the products your company sells.

What does all this have to do with AI? My chief guardrail for AI tools is asking: does this help me be more creative or does this do the creative work for me.

When you’re trying to stand out among the 64GB of data & information the average American consumes every day, you cannot afford to outsource taste & creativity.

Let’s talk about what those two scenarios look like.

AI for content generation

Using AI to generate content is an example of allowing it to do the creative work for you. It’s becoming fairly common with influencers who pump out a ton of content, and brands who are just trying to keep the lights on.

I understand why: creating good content takes a lot of time and mental energy. When you need to pump out 5+ posts/day, or don’t have bandwidth to even get up 1 post per day, using AI sounds like a great workaround.

Yet, there are two problems with this approach:

1. It leaves you in the dark on what is and isn’t working

2. It erodes brand trust because it’s pretty obvious to the discerning eye

Imagine you always always take your car in to the dealership or mechanic. One day you’re break down on the side of the road. Any guess what’s wrong with your car? Chances are, you won’t know & you certainly won’t know how to fix it since you’ve not spent any time under the hood.

The same thing applies to creating content. If you’re outsourcing content to AI, you won’t know what needs to be adjusted when the algorithm inevitably changes, and neither will the AI since it doesn’t adjust to algorithm changes.

The other point to call out is how sophisticated many audiences are. Social media is part of most of our daily lives. Many of us have seen enough to get pretty good at discerning vanilla, machine-generated content and content that was created organically.

As cliche as it sounds, authenticity is important for content. Even if it takes a while, once someone knows you’re not creating your own content, they’ll see it differently. We’re even cognizant of this as an agency.

AI for content ideation & research

For a marketer, AI is really powerful in two areas:

1. Summarizing complex topics

2. Generating content ideas based on common knowledge

If I were to guess, I’d say it has college-level expertise in practically every topic. The difference between that and professional-level expertise is nuance. It’s great for the foundational stuff, but once you get into more gray areas that require context and nuance, it’s too simple.

(Yes, I know the latest version of ChatGPT passed the bar exam. But again, we’re marketers - our arbitrage is more on the side of creativity & novelty than it is information & reasoning)

This is the thin line between it helping you be more creative and it doing the creative work for you.

We all have days where our brain is frozen and we just can’t think of interesting ideas. Using AI then makes a ton of sense. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t think of a title for this piece (it’s been a loong week) - I asked ChatGPT for help.

Again, as you can see, AI tools regress to the mean. They’ll show you ideas based on best practices. Or, in the case of research, they’ll give you the most generally-accepted answer.

You can refine the ideas with some feedback. But don’t expect it to spit out a unique angle or content idea no one’s ever seen. Those come from being in the weeds talking with customers and letting your imagination work.

Should you be using AI?

Sure! Go for it. It can genuinely be helpful. Just remember two things:

1. Give it context to get the best results

2. You’re ultimately the creator—don’t expect AI to do that work for you

That's a wrap, folks! But before you go...

Let me know what you think about this newsletter. Your feedback goes a long way (seriously, I read & respond to every email—good or bad!)

See you next week,