Gray Matters: Stoking the Creative Mind in a World of Chatbots

As the senior managing editor at a digital marketing agency, I’m not a fan of using a generative AI tool for wholesale copy composition.

Also, I use a generative AI tool multiple times daily in my work life.

These two notions aren’t mutually exclusive.

For professionals of all stripes who aren’t writers or who have a tough time communicating on 'paper,' running emails and memos through the tool or asking it outright to do the composition is fine and dandy - it’s great at that.

But for a full-time wordsmith, leaning on AI routinely to do the heavy lifting, especially in longform content, has the potential to dull a creative mind. I’ve seen it first hand in content I’ve edited, and even noticed it at times in my own writing when my back was against the wall, felt those neurons being pruned down to little stubs.

Does this sound familiar?

Here’s a test. Pick up any edition of a smartypants publication like The New Yorker Magazine - or really, anything by a favourite author - and if you’ve let yourself go, you’ll notice it while you’re reading. Maybe it’ll dawn on you that you once knew how to write like that, or something along those lines. It’ll almost certainly get you thinking about how to get your groove back.

The AI Echo Chamber

We’ve noticed large language models (LLMs) tend to repeat themselves when we ask them to generate content wholesale. When you call them out, they’ll cough a bit and apologise, but in regenerating, the language will frequently turn around and give us something 'new' that reads as strangely familiar (is there an echo in here?). One of my co-workers even observed a pattern whereby you could more or less predict the next piece of generated copy in a series by simply substituting in new phrases. This phenomenon only underscores the need for the human touch.

If you’re producing copy at scale, you might wonder, why should this matter?

I’ll give you two big reasons: to help other humans and to help search engines. When a person comes to the interwebs looking for shiny swag or expert advice or whatever the thing is, they expect to find helpful results. And when search engines evaluate web content, the 'winning' pages they position high in the results tend to be the most helpful to those users.

Without getting into the weeds, suffice it to say, there’s anecdotal evidence AI-generated digital copy that’s been gussied up by a writer who’s looking at it critically - not only at the composition but also at the important search engine-optimised (SEO) elements performs better for people and for search engines. In other words, if you’re using generative AI to step in and write for you, know that helpful, effectively optimised web copy demands more than a modicum of retouching so it meets white-hat SEO standards…and it’s plausible a human could’ve written it.

While an AI chatbot can help you produce strong, original content and get it in front of the right people, don’t let it boss you around. At the same time, keep an open mind and stay on top of trends. The technology is evolving at warp speed, so today’s best practices may look different six months from now.

AI: Surprisingly Brilliant at Some Things

Our agency finds generative AI especially useful as a time-saving assistant, especially for content topic ideation and outline creation, for example, or for generating many similar elements in a large spreadsheet where quantity trumps quality. Not everything needs to read like Pulitzer Prize-winning prose.

It’s also an effective tool for taking a large body of resource content (a lengthy litigation update, for example) and distilling it down to its main points in a way a layperson can understand them. You can even ask it to make the 'synopsis' version easy enough for a five-year-old to understand - and it will.

And for some of our agency work, we can and even do use long-form content an AI platform generates, after giving it the best, most detailed prompts we know. Even so, we’re obliged to fact-check everything, and I mean everything, and to make heavy revisions to the output.

AI and the Creativity Conundrum

Our objective as marketing copywriters and editors is not to discount the value in AI as a writing assistant, but to keep it from destroying our capacity for creativity. If you’re a writer, the person who hired you probably noticed a creative spark when your résumé or portfolio bubbled up to the top of the pile on their desk. As an editor, I see one of my biggest challenges as keeping that spark alive and then stoking the fire.

There is a grey area here.

Sensible me knows our team must use AI in the here and now, else we’re just the modern day equivalents of Luddites destroying machinery that’s supposed to help make us more efficient.

Artsy, creative me understands we ought to navigate this new landscape carefully, like learning how to use, say, a new and potentially dangerous piece of textile machinery.

But as team leader, I owe the writers something more akin to the kind of thought leadership no chatbot can give them. I need to position myself where I can help stoke creativity in each writer instead of pounding the creativity out of them. In other words, I’m obliged to nurture the talent and creativity in these actual humans, the very qualities that made me want to hire them in the first place.

So the challenge remains how to keep the artist and storyteller alive in each copywriter.

Enter the Morning Scribe

The Morning Scribe is a brief daily creative writing exercise I give our copy team that serves as an antidote to the same-y, robotic writing the algorithms seem compelled to generate, however much time we sink into coddling and cajoling them.

I see it as a way to help feed the collective imagination in our team before the day gets fully underway. If you need a visual, think of a cloister of robed monks making their way in silence to morning rituals. (The Monty Python version works, too, minus the self-flagellation.)

"These daily exercises allow me to flex my creative muscles, test the boundaries of language and syntax, and get out of my comfort zone before diving back in to what I do best at work: Crafting clear, succinct, optimised copy for digital audiences. They act like a reset button, reminding me of what I love most about writing and building a barrier against distractions for the rest of the day." – Courtney G.

The Scribe takes about the same amount of time you’d spend visiting the loo and refilling your coffee, and the challenge is different every day of the week.

Here’s the thing: This one little exercise holds the potential to regrow neural pathways in the brain (okay, maybe not, but that sure sounds good, doesn’t it?). Significantly, the team actually seems to dig it, and the exercise has revealed a side of these writers they don’t always have the privilege of showing off when they’re writing marketing copy about widgets.

"The things my peers and I write are from the heart, and I love getting deeper insights to who we all are and what we feel, even if we’re just writing about an old rubber band…and I love that spontaneity." – Holly S.

And speaking of widgets. If the talent on this team can write poetic sentences about a rusty screw or a pair of sneakers in the Morning Scribe, imagine what they can bring to website merch landing pages or how-to guides, for example.

When you spend long hours in the trenches trying to come up with a unique angle on how to fold fitted sheets, sometimes you’ve gotta dig deep.

Maybe not quite so deep if the grey matter between your ears is already fired up and glowing bright red.

Deb German is senior managing editor at Eight Oh Two​