It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
These are the lines from A Tale of Two Cities, a famous novel written by Charles Dickens. Those are some of my favorite lines, and I wonder sometimes what Dickens would do if he were alive today.
Would he go to ChatGPT and prompt something like:
Generate a killer intro for a novel that holds the turmoil of the French Revolution. Tell it in the past tense, use a really long sentence with a lot of commas, while starting every sub-sentence with “it” and make sure every small part has antonyms to create conflict and contrast.I don’t know how ChatGPT would respond.
Anyway, (I’ll use a lot of “anyways” to convince you that I didn’t use AI to write this post. I’ll also carefully avoid em dashes to make it huuuman.) from the title, you may have an inkling that I’m a hater of AI.
I’d like to clear that first. No, I’m not a hater, nor a promoter (but somewhat prompter.)
I’m a writer, a marketer. People have been emphasizing using AI for a couple of years. I have been seeing the fuss from the people in marketing.
Maybe they have gone too far where I can’t ever reach; instead, I’m scratching my head on how to utilize my brain. What a cliche!
I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.
― David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising
If you want people to buy from you, you need to connect with them through their minds. To get the best result, you need to establish a heart-to-heart connection.
And who can do that?
Obviously, who has a heart. Who can understand feelings of others.
Now, let me express my thoughts on why I can’t become a true admirer of AI.
I want to write it in simple English.
I want to share my unfiltered thoughts, my raw ideas.
AI tends to use the word “clunky,” but that doesn’t resonate with my taste.
When I use humor that comes naturally, as when I chat with my friends. I don’t want to see a ridiculous piece in the name of “joke” or “humor” that seems injected forcefully.
AI delivers me a fine piece of garbage. Too fine.
That’s not what I want. (You may suggest better prompting. Well, thank you.)
They say act fast, or you’ll be left out.
Because AI led humanity to a 100-year leap.
Does all that mean I don’t use AI?
Not at all.
I use AI when I want to get some ideas for social media posts.
Or, generating social media posts. I mean, your goal is not to let the social channels go dry. And there’s not much benefit to being creative with every single post. Right?
Sometimes I stumble with one-liners (headings, subheadings, titles, taglines). I ask ChatGPT or other inhuman tools to generate a few lines to help my mind spark the right line of words.
Or, when I get difficulties organizing words to keep them under a certain number of words so they look good on a particular portion of the website, I use those tools with the word-limit instruction.
So yes, there are multi-facade use cases with AI tools. I agree. Happy? (Come on, I’m not that dumb.)
AI destroys storytelling quality because it lacks lived experience
– ChatGPT
What’s left is SEO.
They say SEO is dead. The funny thing is, SEO was dead when I started a decade ago.
Whatever. Now lucrative terms have appeared thanks to AI. AEO, GEO, and some more terms I’m not aware of.
The thing is, people are searching more through tools like ChatGPT, and since ChatGPT doesn’t just deliver results but answers your question descriptively, people are becoming addicted.
So the takeaway is you have to appear there and everywhere.
When we used to focus on search engines like Google, all we had to do was organize the content so that Google could easily find our content.
That’s the structural thing anyway, not the creative part.
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, and John Keats wrote Odes. These are a few samples. Really, a few. You can find their signature traits through their creation.
You’re also what you write.
What do AI tools do?
They get one piece from here and another piece from there and create The Epic.
You know that that’s not your creation. I know that’s not your creation.
Anyway, I’m eagerly waiting for the time when AI sources from AI-generated content and makes it more AI (I’m unable to termify it, lol).
If you see me writing about AI (mostly positive things or guides on how to do something with AI, etc.), don’t hate me, please. I have a family to run, mouths to feed, no?
(I spent an hour writing this post that ChatGPT can generate in a minute with a much better format. Oh, how dumb I am!)
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