The Humans Are (Not) Dead: Human Marketing Vs AI for Small Business

Perhaps it’s being exposed to the Terminator movies at too young an age, but somehow I’m not quite digesting the slop that AI technocrats are trying to force-feed me about how it will help humanity. And while I won’t pretend I’m not afraid of a robot apocalypse, for me, the more prescient fear comes from AI’s ever-forward assault on human thought and creativity.

However, one bright spot in the war of the machines is that in the battle of human marketing vs AI for small business, human content writing continues to be the clear winner.

Some might say that my descent from our robot overlords is because they threaten my business, but in truth, AI has sold more jobs for me than even the most clever marketing campaign I can come up with. POP’s differentiator of AI-free content has been amazing for my sales team! And it’s not because we bash it. It’s because we keep coming across people who’ve used it and know the difference.

But why? Why are people excited at POP’s flag-planting proclamation of AI-free content? Why not use AI for marketing?

Well, I’m going to tell you. Read on.

Understanding Voice – No T-1000

One thing AI is not good at is being you. Authenticity matters.

A good marketing agency takes the time to get to know a client and speak in the correct voice for them. It learns the stories, the ideal customers, and the quirks.

AI can’t do that. It moves toward sameness, and even when it imitates, something always feels off. Like the famous uncanny valley we encounter in some animation, it’s not quite human, but it’s not different enough from it either. You land in a place that just makes you feel uncomfortable.

The Unexpected – Goodness Gracious Me

By its very nature, generative AI is predictive. And as predictive text, it averages out other text to come up with the likely response. For images, it’s the same.

In other words, it takes everything it’s read and homogenizes it. It doesn’t challenge it. It doesn’t create something new. It creates something that is a cross between everything that’s come before it that answers your prompt.

So it’s less likely to come up with something unique, different, or surprising.

Comedy works on surprise. So does much of marketing.

It can’t feel. It creates a facsimile of it

Telling the Truth – You’re Right to Question It, I Was Incorrect…

Of course, one of the largest and most obvious offenses committed by AI is hallucination. AI is programmed to be pleasing. Like social media, its point is to keep users occupied so they keep coming back for more.

And you know what people like? Simple answers.

If the truth is nuanced or out of reach, AI acts like a 5-year-old being asked what it’s been doing all day. Don’t have a satisfactory answer? It’ll make one up.

When it’s something comical like the number of Rs in strawberry that can be easily fact-checked, like the 5-year-old claiming it doesn’t know why the cookies are missing, it can be pretty amusing.

But when you don’t spot the lie, the mistake can hurt your reputation and ruin client trust. It can also ruin your credibility with search engines.

Copyright, AmIRight?

AI copyright is a new legal frontier, but judgments so far have been fascinating.

Did you know that you have no legal right to an image that AI created? You can’t copyright it! So just because you’re using it for your logo doesn’t mean that someone else can’t.

Here’s another important fact to keep in mind: AI builds what it builds from other sources, so there are no guarantees that what it made you doesn’t contain elements from another artist’s material.

So you may steal someone else’s creation without realizing it and believe you built something new.

Some  AI companies protect themselves from trouble by putting the legal ramifications onto their users. Some companies have some assurance. But chances are, when you signed your waiver with your favorite AI service, you didn’t catch every detail of it.

My General Issue with Outsourcing Creativity

My main issue with AI isn’t really any of the things I listed above. It’s a principled stance on human creativity. I’m not interested in seeing a movie that wasn’t written by a person. I’m not interested in a book without a human point of view.

I don’t like the idea of people outsourcing their imagination to an algorithm so they have more time to make money for their employers. Frankly, I’d rather outsource everything else, so we have more time for creativity.

Of course, then we get into Battlestar Galactica territory. With that, if robots get to a point that they have a point of view, I could see myself reading a blog or watching a movie from a Six- or Data-like android who had something to say. And I would argue for us to give it some rights.

But that’s not where we are now. Today, in human marketing vs AI for small business, what we’re looking at is new ideas vs no ideas, of your point of view vs the average of everyone else’s point of view.

It’s an argument of authenticity vs “who cares.” If you fall into the who cares camp, the copyright and business reasons we state above should still be enough to keep you away from AI for your own marketing since it will still lead to a loss in business and credibility.

But if that’s the only reason you care, you might not be an ideal POP client. And that’s AI-ok.