The Cost of the Easy Button

Back in October 2024, I wrote a Tuesday 2¢ titled “Should AI Take Your Creative Journey?”, making the point that, in many cases, the act of writing is more than a means to an end, of producing a thing.

The author's journey, the things discovered along the way, critical thinking, editing the bits that need a judgment call on taste and discernment (or, as I said in the article, testing if it sounds a bit wanky), the flow we feel, and the honing of the craft are as important as the output, the blog post, article, or whatever it is.

And if we lean too heavily on generative AI to do that for us, we cheat ourselves of the best bits.

I was reminded of this, as Alison Jones, a wonderful writing coach, founder of Practical Inspiration Publishing, writer, and, of relevance to this story, the host of The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast, just shared an episode called “Writing is Resistance” (link in the comments, of course) which, with her experience and craft mastery, explored this more eloquently and in much greater depth.

Quoting from James Marriott's Cultural Capital Substack, she shared that the “reading revolution,” the 18th-century spread of literacy, which gave people the opportunity to read new ideas and share their own, represented the greatest transfer of knowledge in human history.

Contrasting this with today, the decline in reading as a leisure pursuit, how the Smartphone now dominates our attention, and how AI is offering us the writing easy button, these skills, like an unexercised muscle, could be atrophying.

And you can see this not just in creative, if you widen this lens to the other things marketers do.

For example, Distinguished VP Analyst Christy Uher Ferguson shared the graphic below on LinkedIn from her latest research, “Reinventing Demand Generation in the Era of AI Agents”.

The research describes a 24-month horizon in which a large swath of demand generation and digital marketing execution will be led by AI, especially for data-driven or easily codified processes. People only lead when decisions or activities require creativity, discernment, taste, or interaction with another person.

I admit, I don’t have access to the research, just this diagram, but when I asked Christy in a comment if this was the case, she confirmed it, saying,

“Yes, exactly. Let us not forget the 'art' amidst all the 'science’”.

But, as Alison shared, art is hard.

Where is the motivation for the struggle when the easy button is right there, an easy button that we are being increasingly incentivized and encouraged to use?

Why learn SEO, good email copywriting, or even developing an ICP and personas if Claude can do it?

Well, we think it can do it, it looks like it’s doing it, but is it any good?

Who knows or cares?

Who will learn what good looks like?

And, what does this mean for young people coming into marketing?

When you look at this prediction from Gartner, what, on this diagram, will they do?

How will they develop the human bits; “the decisions or activities require creativity, discernment, taste, or interaction with another person”.

If the easy button atrophies the skill, who decides what good looks like?

And will it matter?

Do we care that our cars are made by robots and not hand beaten by artisans?

No, but they are designed by creative people with taste who can craft things in clay.

What can be processed and codified will be, but I think the future of marketing and communications needs the artisans, willing to battle the resistance and do the work.

Like Alison. :-)