Spare me your false idols...

I've already seen the Satanic mills

There’s nowt new under the sun, is there?

The AI discourse is rumbling on. It’s going to take our jobs/kill us all/destroy the economy more surely than a tangerine tosspot who’s just learned the word tariff.

AI will steal all of our ideas, repackage them, and sell them more cheaply.

I’ve heard it all before.

Back in 2011, I had a good long chat with fellow copywriter Tom Albrighton about people stealing all our ideas, repackaging them, and selling them more cheaply.

Only instead of it being robots, it was baby freelancers and offshore people working for content mills. Biorobots, basically, for anyone who still can’t stop thinking about Chernobyl.

That conversation turned into a blog post that’s long since been deleted in the name of decency. I called it the blogging human centipede.

Someone would have a good idea. Then some millworker would gobble that idea down and shit out a slightly worse version. Someone would then gobble that down, use some sort of automated re-writing tool to shit out something even worse.

And on and on and on. Like a human centipede. Aren’t you glad I’m not that scatological nowadays?

It used to be the Satanic content mills, and now it’s the false idol of generative AI. Or regurgitative AI, when you consider that it can’t generate anything new.

The reason that AI won’t replace people is the same reason that I’m working for an agency I co-founded and not a penny-per-word content farm.

Value.

Where’s the value?

There will always be people looking for any old shite to hit a word count. There’s a whole virtual economy where robots write content stuffed with keywords so other robots index it, which triggers a robotic counter somewhere to say “that’s someone viewing this content.”

The only human interaction with that system is paying for the fucking thing. All power to ‘em. If that’s your jam, then a robot that’ll do exactly what you tell it to do is just fine. Not sure what you’re getting out of it, mind, other than a bill.

But the robot can’t advise you. Can’t tell you what it thinks you should do. It can’t think.

Strategy, psychology, experience - that’s where the value is. Everything else is just typing. And I’d be happy for my computer to do that for me while I focus on what’s really important.

So spare me the woe-is-me, and don’t hold up these false computerised idols.

I’ve seen it all before. AI is just a tool.

And the people who’ll really take your jobs are the ones that use tools better than you can.

Something mint - a pleasant ad about unpleasant pheasants

This is bloody brilliant. A proper attention-grabbing advert from the back of last week’s Private Eye.

Given that brief, a copywriter would 100% have wanted to run a long-form advert explaining all those horrible things in graphic detail with some real emotive language.

And a graphic designer would’ve wanted a big old picture of a sad pheasant with three words on it.

But when you get a team united around a message, and use a little bit of storytelling, you get a piece that’s more than the sum of its parts. Visually engaging, verbally effective, and far more memorable than a lot of charity advertising you see.

I just think it’s neat.