Keep Your Robot on a Leash

A Content Guy's Plea for AI and Internet Stewardship

I wrote this article on my LinkedIn page first, because when I did it I wasn’t really thinking so much about Communication Orchestration.

But on closer examination, I think it has more relevance than first glance revealed.

The more we communicate, and the more the general population gets involved in the communication process, the more brand comms become populated with generative AI soundbites - both literally and metaphorically.

Communication Orchestration calls for the voices at your company to come together to share the good word together, and in a unified fashion.

It doesn’t call for slop.

The thing is, most people aren’t professional writers or videographers, designers, artists, or creators of any particular thing for the Internet.

That’s not to say they have no talent, or that they couldn’t be if they wanted to, just that it hasn’t been their thing.

AI has democratized the creative process, much to the chagrin of people who trained for years to make money participating professionally in that process. In some ways that’s fine. I love being able to generate an email in German to a doctor to clarify something I lack the words to do myself. It’s great.

But with regard to orchestration, as we seek to enable employees to give voice to their companies, to become content creators and communicators at scale, our wish is that they do so responsibly and meaningfully.

My concern is that they do not.

So here’s my little rant on the subject. It’s mostly for marketers, because I think we sometimes underestimate the role that marketers play in society, and I think there needs to be more accountability in that regard.

I hope it strikes a chord.

I’ll preface what became a very long post by saying that I love AI.

I use it in several forms pretty much every day, both professionally and otherwise. It plays at least some role in almost every project I’m involved in, and every piece of content I create. (It was not involved in this one, for symbolic reasons, obviously).

To be clear, in this I am generally referring to generative AI - the kind your kid is using “just to check their work”.

Furthermore, this is not about AI replacing anyone or taking jobs. It’s not about “AI can never replace writers”. It clearly is replacing writers, but that’s beside the point.

This is about why you need to be responsible with it in your marketing or content work, particularly if it’s public. This is about being good stewards of information, brand identity, and the value that our roles continue to bring to the world.

Generative AI is not a magic bullet for your content, and I’m tired of so many blindly treating it like it is.

Having content specialists (marketers, writers, operations, technical writers, strategists, the list goes on) at a company is a luxury that most do not have. Most companies hire agencies or freelancers because they either do not have the resources, the budget, or the expertise to strategize, create, analyze, or manage content in-house.

This is fine. Never in my career have I been hired to fill a vacancy. People rarely go looking for content strategists to join their team; we usually have to convince companies that they need us, or start our own agencies (and convince companies that they need us).

All of this changed, though, when generative AI came along and made it possible for non-creatives to produce an unbelievably large amount of stuff in an unbelievably small amount of time.

As a result, the Internet has become an objectively worse place in terms of content quality, value, and usefulness. The major tech companies that produce these tools have not exactly been the most outstanding stewards, either.

In our mad dash to produce more content, we often seem to forget to ask why we’re producing in the first place.

This also isn’t meant to be an ethical rant about regulation or bad actors using AI for destructive purposes. All of that matters, but I’m simply here to remind everyone in the marketing or content space to verify, edit, and breathe life back into the words you wish to bring to the world, because you’ll likely grow old waiting around for Sam Altman to build the AI that can actually do it for you.

It has become impossible for most people to really trust what they see or read anymore.

While many of us in marketing or in content have for years now been able to recognize the countless signs of AI-generated writing, the average user largely has not. However, even if they do not know when something is AI, they do know when it’s useless.

But this is changing, and more people are becoming either more aware of AI patterns, or at least more aware that the things they’re reading or watching suck progressively more and more each month.

Spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, or even more so, an anonymous forum like Reddit, where faces aren’t seen, and thoughts have fewer guardrails, and you’ll see how quickly one of the world’s largest repositories of words masquerading as knowledge has devolved into a bubbling stew of meaningless, artificial drivel.

You could argue that much of it was always meaningless drivel, but at least Rayjebaitr69’s racist political commentary had soul, you know?

So what am I getting at?

Marketers have always played a significant, transformative role in creating the Zeitgeist. Our work influences people’s interests, desires, and the way they spend (or don’t spend) their money. This has far bigger ramifications on society than we give ourselves credit for. I believe that this places a far larger onus of responsibility on us to produce material that is of quality, that carries meaning, that has value.

You have been given unprecedented tools to shape meaning, and the most invasive way of delivering it that the world has ever seen.

We can use these powers to help people solve whatever their problems may be. We are the builders of tribes and icons, turning brands into cultural pillars and historical giants. We are camouflaged agents of change that heavily influence the way the world communicates, thinks, buys, and innovates.

We shape the elements of impression: ads, the brands, the things people see and understand about the organizations, businesses, and people around them.

Modern marketers are gatekeepers of the digital experience.

Are we being responsible gatekeepers? Are we delivering value to the people who consume our content? Are we taking advantage of revolutionary new technology to deliver a better digital space for the people we want to communicate with?

Or, are we using AI as a way of avoiding effort, of passing off a task we don’t want, and accepting “good enough”, just as long as it’s done?

Each month it seems more and more like the latter.

It is so easy to become seduced by the ease of creating everything with gen-AI. I know this because I’ve been there. I am there. I know how lovely it is to instantly have an email written that you barely had to think about.

It’s so simple to press Enter, instantly receive a lengthy, well-formatted response, read a few sentences, check the grammar (which is always fine), shrug, copy, paste, and post without critically analyzing the substance of what we unleash on an unsuspecting and far-too-trusting Internet.

Did that generated copy really address the nuances of your situation? Did the AI actually understand your prompt the way you did? Does it know what your relationship is to the reader? Did you make sure that you checked every word?

But did you, though, really?

So please, for the love of the Internet, stop copying and pasting whatever your generative AI platform of choice gives you.

Please stop letting it take the reins. Keep your robot on a leash.

It cannot write a blog article that anyone actually wants to read.

It cannot write your client email. Don’t insult their intelligence by thinking they can’t see it.

It cannot make reliable, trustworthy statements or data for your white paper.

It cannot script a video that anyone will find compelling.

It cannot be a replacement for your effort and thought.

It can help you to do these things; it can help you do them faster than ever before. It can help you make more emails, more articles, do faster, more thorough research, and more. But it cannot do it alone, and we all need to stop treating it like it can. AI is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool.

So don’t just change a few words. Don’t just remove the em-dashes, erase the word “ensure”, or check for antithesis clauses. Instead of checking for all the abuses of “The Rule of 3s”, you can just write it so they aren’t there to begin with.

You did this five years ago. Did you forget how?

Rewrite or rearrange. Use it for building frameworks. Use it to generate ideas. Use it to edit your work, or give feedback. If you do need its words, walk through every paragraph with it and think critically about what it said. Challenge every word it gives you.

It’s great at these things (usually). It’s also great at getting your mind going and helping you find inspiration. And sometimes it does have some golden one-liners or metaphors.

And I know, there will be people who respond to me like this:

“Well, my prompts are good, so my content is good…”,

“Well, I saw my SEO go up by a bajillion Internet points by producing ten thousand articles per day!”

“Well, the AI I’m building actually makes good content!”

”Have you tried Perplexity?”

Or the worst one:

“I honestly don’t care”.

Just because we like AI; that we see the potential applications for it, and we want to push it to its limits, doesn’t mean that our responsibility towards making the Internet a less bad place goes away.

The mountains of digital garbage that we produce make us look bad as professionals. They harm our brands, they undermine our credibility as content experts.

They contribute to informational hyperinflation that helps no one and hurts everyone.

They make us look sloppy, disinterested, uninvested, cheap, irresponsible, and potentially dangerous.

So if you’re gonna use AI to write your content - great, it’s a wonderful tool. But don’t take what it gives you at face value. Be the human in the room.

And If you ever find yourself looking for an AI tool to help your AI tool sound less like an AI tool, it might be time to step back and critically consider how much you really care about the outcome you seek to create.