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With generative AI we are on the wrong track.
Over the last few months, I have been impressed by the messages coming from major generative AI vendors. Unfortunately, these messages fuel the hype around implementing generative AI in creative and marketing workflows.
Take, for example, this recent quote from Mira Murati, CTO at OpenAI, in response to the question of whether AI could replace humans: “Some creative jobs may disappear, but maybe they shouldn't have existed in the first place.”
Really?
However, she is not the only one making such statements. Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, has claimed that AI would “take over 95% of what marketers are asking agencies, strategists and creative professionals to do today.”
And of course, there is that famous quote from economist Richard Baldwin at the World Economic Forum's 2023 Growth Summit: “AI is not going to take your job. It's someone using AI that's going to take your job.”
It's not that these statements are entirely right or entirely wrong. If you take any of these statements apart, you'll hear some people say, “Well, what they meant by that was…”
And therein lies the problem. It is not about the accuracy of the statement, but about its interpretation.
Technology companies make technology the hero of the story. They tell people they should be happy that they have such great tools. And they fuel the argument that human creativity is a problem that needs to be solved.
This is ironic considering that each of these technologies was based on products of human creativity for its development.
This is the path to sophisticated mediocrity
During this artificial intelligence gold rush, business leaders are not rushing to tell investors, analysts, customers and other listeners how many roles they can replace with technology in the name of efficiency.
But will some of the early adopters regret this decision? Two researchers believe so. Last year, they published an article in the Harvard Business Review arguing that while the initial numbers “might look good, especially in terms of cost reduction,” the company will miss out on the opportunity to make big profits by creating significant value – or a viable future niche.
I see this with some companies that have replaced content creators with generative AI. Yes, they are producing more content than ever before – they have managed to make content production at scale more efficient.
And the content they create? It's average. It's neither bad nor good enough to be noteworthy. It's just average.
And it leads us into an age of cultivated mediocrity.
Malicious content and marketing issues
I wrote a few years ago about the “wicked problems” in companies’ content and marketing strategies.
A wicked problem is difficult to solve because “incomplete, conflicting, or changing requirements are difficult to recognize.” Information researcher Jeff Conklin described wicked problems as those “that are only understood after a solution has been formulated.”
Think about how you organize your kitchen. Maybe it works well enough for you, but you may not realize how much better it could be until someone suggests changes that make it much better. Only then do you realize that you actually had a problem that was worth solving.
Marketing is full of problems. Your content or marketing approach may be working just fine. You know everything isn't running smoothly, but nothing is so dysfunctional that fixing it becomes a priority.
But then you try to fix one small thing and find that many other areas of the business need improvement as well. Are the problems serious enough to justify the interruption? Unfortunately, you won't know until you try.
For example, about three months ago I was working with a fast-growing technology company to roll out a new governance model, a new workflow, and a new content lifecycle plan. The people who had been with the company for less than a year were excited. They were excited.
But executives and some experienced marketing and content professionals disagreed. They agreed that the new plan sounded good. But they didn't think the problem it would solve was important enough to spend time on.
This is crazy.
I often hear CEOs and CFOs ask, “What is the benefit of fixing this problem?” The answer is, “We don’t know yet.”
Why next-generation AI is (probably) not a big problem
Unfortunately, these exaggerated statements that artificial intelligence will replace humans or teams seem to have created a serious problem in the areas of creativity and marketing.
When business leaders hear about developments in artificial intelligence, they think, “This is such a cool innovation. We must have a problem it can solve – we just don't know what it is.”
Due to exaggerated promises that generative AI will replace agencies and creatives, the mood is changing to: “Some of our creative jobs are probably redundant and outdated. Maybe that's the problem that generative AI can solve for us.”
I'm not saying that there aren't some organizations that employ more people than they need or that could improve their efficiency or productivity. And those are serious problems.
But implementing artificial intelligence (AI) as a (theoretically) low-cost replacement for humans interacting with customers or creating content is usually not the solution to a serious problem.
It is a solution approach.
Resistance to the message of the solution approach
The term “solutionism” was coined by technology critic Evgeny Morozov and describes the belief that every problem can be solved with a technical solution.
And the solution approach is at the heart of all these statements from providers of generative AI solutions.
When Mira Murati says that some creative roles “shouldn’t have existed in the first place,” she reinforces the idea that the need for creative roles is a problem that can be solved with technology.
When Sam Altman says that “95% of the work marketers do today from agencies, strategists and creative professionals” will be taken over by AI, he is suggesting that inefficiencies in the art of creative marketing need to be corrected.
And the bumper sticker warning, “AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI will,” suggests that generative AI is the hero we should prove our worth to.
If we buy into these statements, we plunge into the era of sophisticated mediocrity. That is, we trade the diversity of human thought for a sophisticated solution to a nonexistent problem.
No CEO wakes up and says, “We have too many people with too many creative ideas. Let's save some money and get rid of them.” But when CEOs tell their teams to figure out how many (or what) resources they could jettison by implementing second-generation AI, they force that calculation.
There are a few things we can do to avoid this trap. The most important step is to take a very important first step: understand and document the opportunity where you want to apply AI. This may sound like a no-brainer.but I see that more and more companies are failing with generative AI.
Just last week, it was reported that 20,000 employees at energy giant Chevron are testing Microsoft's Copilot, a suite of AI-powered chatbots and other tools in Microsoft's Office 365 apps that can answer questions and draft emails. The problem? According to Bill Braun, the company's CIO: “We're a little bit dissatisfied with our ability to know how [well] it works”.
In my opinion, that's how it's going to stay. You can't give 20,000 people a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and then expect them to give you an accurate value.
In any productive rollout of an enterprise-wide innovation, you must first understand what value you are trying to determine. And to do that, you must understand the existing process that deserves to be valued. It will be impossible for Chevron to truly determine total value until it understands what it is trying to solve.
I am not arguing against the use of generative AI. I am cautioning against using certain arguments to push the technology forward. There are many difficult problems to uncover in the field of content and marketing. And many activities we perform every day could be improved by technologies like generative AI.
The key is to understand the difference between solving a real problem and forcing technical solutions to problems that don't exist.
And this is how you avoid cultivated mediocrity.
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Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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