Clean Up in Aisle AI

There was a time when, as a marketer, an idea would float into the office or the sales and marketing meeting, from someone outside marketing, like the logo needs to be bigger, we should be on TikFace or competing with Accenture for the prime signage at Heathrow.

Today, we laugh at these simpler times, as now those ideas are communicated via a 10-page report created by AI.

A sympathetic AI that’s not going to say this is a TERRIBLE idea after the first prompt, or ask the hard questions about budget, context, or what we would need to stop doing to bring this terrible idea to life.

It will relentlessly explore every avenue to appease the prompter and tell them how fucking smart they are.

What was a decent five-minute chat to qualify an idea, then decide to invest (or not), is now half a day of examining this tome of “evidence” coughed up by the LLM.

And the cruelest part is that even the person who sends it to you admits, “I just skim read, it looks pretty good”.

You feel maybe they invested 15 minutes into this…

Tops.

And yet, it needs your FULL attention.

We get a nugget of an idea, buried in a bucket of AI slop. It’s a convoluted AI-fueled fever dream about a topic that was new to the person who prompted it.

And this is just an example from the marketing department. Now we all have an AI smart arse at our side. What sort of friction will this add to every decision in a business?

And, I say “smart-arse” as that’s the editorial policy of this blog, but I am not anti-AI. I use it constantly; it’s augmenting my processes, not necessarily replacing anybody, but helping me do things I haven’t got the time or budget for, to produce better work.

But there's a difference between an expert using it as a tool and a non-expert using it as a substitute for thinking.

Suddenly, every meeting, every buying group, every project team, every functional unit within a business will have twice as many voices, as we all have our favorite AI assistant chipping in.

Everyone has an inexhaustible supply of empathetic, all-knowing research to make their case. Without the taste, discernment, or understanding that makes one an expert in that topic.

And this potential friction is encouraged; business leaders are actively seeking ways for us to adopt AI to reduce labor costs, or maybe to post-rationalize why they just fired everyone.

But maybe we have this all wrong about the labor saved by AI; it’s actually going to take twice as many of us to review this stuff.

What perhaps would have been more efficient was the old way. Suggest we be on TikFace by all means, but then let the expert do the LLM’ing for you. Just stick to asking the question you want answered.

Maybe we should communicate in prompts, not in buckets of synthetic slop.

But sometimes, I honestly feel like someone has dropped something unpleasant into my inbox, and I need to clear it up.

Over the tannoy, I just heard.

“Clean up in Aisle AI”