X isn’t just Y. It’s Z! But Q is the real game-changer!
I used to think that A was B. But I was wrong! C is more compelling, engaging, and revolutionary than I could have imagined!
Have your eyes glazed over yet?
When ChatGPT and its ilk first rose to prominence, people regarded it with stars in their eyes. Frenzied pundits howled from metaphorical rooftops about the coming AI knowledge explosion and the pending obsolescence of creativity. I like to think that most people know better by now, even if the evangelists are yet to put down their megaphones.
After all, we just endured two full years of increasingly tedious slop.
In that time, we watched out-of-touch leaders burn hundreds of billions on the hollow promise that AI will eventually manifest into some sort of silver bullet. We watched them cut tens of thousands of jobs as they replaced humans with LLMs. We watched memory prices skyrocket to an eye-watering extent, enough that it’s literally driving manufacturers bankrupt.
And after all that, we watched the companies that pushed AI the hardest fall flat on their faces as — surprising absolutely no one — their precious agents proved catastrophically inept.
Turns out, it’s just as I’ve always maintained. You can’t automate creativity or outsource emotion. You can’t systematize expertise or offload intuition to a machine.
Bafflingly, there are still people who think otherwise.
Some of them simply don’t understand the technology and its limitations. Most AI models are, at their core, little more than sophisticated pattern matching systems. Feed them a large enough dataset, and they might convincingly imitate human outputs.
But it’s ultimately just empty mimicry. Claude can’t truly comprehend the harsh bite of winter against one’s skin during a morning commute. Midjourney lacks the artistry and imagination to genuinely experience the ideas evoked by a painting. Gemini doesn’t know how to love, hate, or even feel.
When you ask any of these models to create something, they merely churn bits and pieces of the content they’ve devoured into a chimeric approximation. Most of that content is stolen, by the way. Even Anthropic, which has cloyingly branded itself as the ethical AI company, recently paid out $1.5 billion to authors whose work it pirated to train Claude.
Feeding the Marketing Slopmachine
It’s all more than a little dystopian, isn’t it?
We’re literally consuming tens of billions of litres of water, pushing energy infrastructure beyond its breaking point, and teetering on the brink of global financial collapse for a technology that’s yet to deliver any meaningful, large-scale return. We’re told, over and again, that we just need to wait and see. AI is transformative, it’s revolutionary, the real disruption is right around the corner!
I’m sure it’s no accident that so many of the people making those claims stand to benefit regardless of whether AI goes down as history’s greatest lemon.
Unfortunately, mediocre leaders who’ve spent their entire careers failing upwards can’t help but lap up this rhetoric. They love being told what to think by the middling techbros the media cannot help but lionize. And they’ll never stop to question, even for a moment, if they might be wrong.
This thoughtless dedication is why marketing and other creative fields are now adrift in a sea of generic slop. Stephanie Sterling, host of the Jimquisition, classed the people driving this push as automatons talking to automatons, unable to recognize context or understand the why and how of the art they want to sell. Edward Zitron described them even more viciously: Business Idiots.
“Why would companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of their service, even though customers don’t like it and it doesn’t really work?” writes Zitron. “It’s simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.”
“Much like the Business Idiot themselves, ChatGPT doesn’t need to do anything specific,” he continues. “It just needs to make the right sounds at the right times to impress people that barely care what it does other than make them feel futuristic….it’s the symbolic future of capitalism — one that celebrates mediocrity and costs billions of dollars, every human work it can consume, and the destruction of our planet, all because everybody has kind of agreed that this is what they’re all doing, with nobody able to give a convincing explanation of what that even is.”
The insistence on continuing to worship this chattering slop engine might be understandable if anyone other than Sam Altman and his ilk had anything to show for it.
Instead, 95% of AI pilots fail to generate any tangible return. OpenAI, regarded by many as a pioneer in the AI space, is falling apart. Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are seeing stock prices plummet.
“But it’ll all be worth it; you just have to trust us.”
In the meanwhile, customers across both B2B and B2C have started to revolt. Only 26% prefer AI-generated content to human-made. Moreover, those who know a product’s source are positively biased toward human over machine.
All this is assuming, of course, that your brand can even get noticed by using generative AI. It’s far more likely that you’ll end up fading into a haze of digital noise. Sure, the content you generate might be technically sound and gain occasional traction.
But ultimately, you’re speaking in a voice that sounds the same as everyone else to deliver the same message as everyone else. You’ll end up being just another generic droplet in an ocean of mediocrity. A gray, forgettable ghost as compelling as plain oatmeal.
Are there some brands that are genuinely that forgettable? Sure. It might sound a bit harsh, but some companies simply aren’t going to stand out no matter what one does.
Those kinds of businesses are few and far between. Most brands have something unique about them; some hook or characteristic that makes them infinitely more compelling than the competition. If they insist on leaving AI in the driver’s seat, they’ll never find that hook.
They’ll simply fade into obscurity.
Marketing Without Humanity is Meaningless
Again, I want to be clear that I don’t hate artificial intelligence. I’m deeply fascinated by its scientific and medical applications. I believe it has genuine value in cybersecurity and compliance.
AI even has a part to play in marketing. Lead qualification and scoring, sentiment monitoring, and post-sales outreach are all excellent applications of the technology. Similarly, research, data validation, and search engine optimization can all benefit from a bit of AI assistance.
What I find contemptible is the ongoing push to ram the round peg of machine intelligence into the square hole of human ingenuity. It’s foisting AI on a use case it was never intended to fulfill at the expense of everything that makes us unique. It’s the driving force behind the technology’s greatest social and environmental harms.
And ultimately, it’s also one big racket. It’s digital snake oil peddled by people who neither understand nor care about originality. To them, everything should be automated, systematized, and fed into an algorithm, because they’ve always viewed the world as nothing more than a series of bland inputs and outputs.
Now more than ever, people crave connection. They long for creativity and wit. They want to work with brands that feel like they’re operated by actual human beings rather than a chatbot’s ersatz impersonation of a corporate executive.
To put it another way:
Why should anyone bother consuming what you couldn’t be bothered to create?
