Is there a lower bar than average?

I made a simple rule for myself not long after the first 'suggested reply' prompts showed up on Linkedin: Thou shalt not use them.

If a reply I was typing looked like one of their suggested prompts (eg. "Congrats Sean!"), I'd try to give it something, anything, that made it look like it was written by a human, not an algorithm. Like this: "Congrats Sean! Now you can go home for Thanksgiving!" My friend's parents were very skeptical of advertising as his career choice.

I know. You're thinking "of all the hills to die on", but there's a reason behind this admittedly pedantic form of resistance.

I hate giving up my voice to someone else.

As someone who's made his living with words, letting an algorithm talk for me is, and I don't use this word lightly, insulting.

But it's more than that.

AI learns from what's been written before. It takes the millions, er... billions of past replies to similar posts, averages them out, and then spits out three average replies for you to choose from. So you get either: a) "Congrats!", b) "Way to go!", or c) "Well deserved!"

I'll take d) none of the above.

AI creates average. And is there a bar lower for anything than average?

Average is about the worst thing you can possibly say about someone or something. No one has ever said yes to: "Wanna go see that average movie that just came out?" Or taken me up on: "Oh, you're single? I've got an average friend you should meet!"

I would rather be horrible than average. At least you remember horrible. You can learn from horrible.

I once did an ad so horrible, I wanted to throw up when I saw the first cut. For real. I tasted bile in my throat. It was embarrassingly bad. But I learned some things from that horrible experience. The most important being: don't ever, EVER, try to make a client who's mad at you for doing a risky ad, happy by making them a really safe ad.

Because average is ignorable.

Choosing "Congrats Sean!" from a menu of options offered to you by Linkedin is the equivalent of saying nothing, because it means nothing. Especially when the next ten 'replies' all say the exact same thing. Actually, it means less than nothing because it says you couldn't take thirty seconds to say something better than what a robot wrote.

So what does that mean for advertising?

Well, I saw an ad the other night for Tremclad's Turbo spray paint which can paint 3X faster than regular spray paint. And I can verify 100% that it was not written through the power of AI.

I know this because I checked the entire internet, and no one has ever written this line before:

AI can write 3X THE SPEED or 3X THE POWER or 3X THE COVERAGE. As can any average writer.

But AI can't write 3X THE PSSSSHHHHT.

And it's the PSSSSHHHHT that I remember. (As I do the really smart way that they typeset the line, cutting off the last "H" and "T", and ragging the line in a very non-linear way. Props to the art director who did that and the client who said yes to it.)

AI can't write PSSSSHHHHT because it's new. It's original. It's a creative leap that on the surface defies logic (PSSSSHHHT isn't even a word), but is immediately understood by anyone who's ever used a spray can.

Which is both good news and bad news for writers (and ad people in general).

The bad news is that AI is great at average writing. It can create in seconds what three average writers can create in three days. If you're an average writer, AI is coming for you. And if average writing is what you clients out there are looking for to generate your weekly content load, save your money and give it to AI.

The good news? AI is average at great writing.

And if you clients have any sense, you're going to give that money you just saved to the great writers and agencies out there who can help you solve the big, hairy problems you do have. Because they're the people that can make your messaging stand out, and your product stand out from the average muck of work we consumers see every day.

They're the people who can make your sales go PSSSSHHHHT.