AI doesn't magically make things good, it makes things MORE.
AI isn't a magic wand, it's a GPS. It can help you create things faster, but only if you set the direction.
Many years ago I met up with a freelancing friend to chat about how their experience in winning clients and contracts. He shared loads of great advice, but the one line that stuck with me was, ‘I might not be the best, but I’m the fastest.’ Speed was a superpower.
Fast forward to today and AI has made it so that everyone can make things fast. Ads turned around in hours, websites built in a day, briefs completed in minutes.
This got me thinking, if speed is no longer a superpower, your competitive advantage becomes your taste. But, in a world of mass content creation and consumption, if you have the same taste as everyone else, you’re likely just going to add to the noise, rather than stand out.
Now, I didn’t want to write ANOTHER thinkpiece on the importance of taste, think that’s been well and truly explored and agreed upon. What I’ve decided to explore is how AI works with taste, literal examples of taste (not just taste as an abstract concept), and then how I’m using ‘my taste’.
So for this episode we’re going to explore these 3 things:
AI is basically going to speed up the rate of your skill / experience / taste.
Your lived experience, training, learning, skill etc becomes even more important.
Limitations are more useful than just going far and wide.
Let’s goooooo.
AI MAKES THINGS MORE
I spoke to someone the other day who shared that their Creative Director was running rings around the non-creatives in the business who were using AI for image generation. Why? Because they had the knowledge, the experience, and the competence to know what exactly they needed to input, in order to generate the desired asset.
In an almost crudely basic example, you can imagine 2 types of approaches to prompting AI tools:
“Write a heartwarming ad for a coffee brand.”
or
“Write a 60-second cinematic ad for a coffee brand that explores the ritual of forgiveness between a mother and her adult daughter. Set it during a tense Sunday morning visit. Use coffee as the quiet bridge between them — no dialogue until the final scene. Tone: intimate, restrained, emotionally raw. Visuals should be grounded, natural light, handheld camera feel. Music: minimal, almost silent except for ambient sounds. Final line should be a single, emotionally loaded sentence that ties coffee to second chances.”
The first is probably going to generate a very generic, average ad. It’s got nothing to go on so it’s filling a blank page with its own interpretation of ‘heartwarming’.
The second however, is going to produce something with more layers, more specificity. The prompt has insight, a vision, and the know-how to see the ad not just about coffee but about coffee being a catalyst for connection with storytelling principles and technical details. AI here is an amplifier for your creative territory.
I’ll do another example, this time for marketers. Let’s take a generic prompt used by someone who’s not familiar with the complexity of marketing, vs someone who’s had a few years experience.
“Write a marketing plan to help sell more cereal.”
or
“Create a 12-month marketing plan for a premium adult cereal brand facing mid-tier competition and private label pressure. Focus on defending market share and improving penetration by 3%. Prioritise core mental availability through distinctive brand assets and consistent memory structures. Reframe cereal consumption from ‘morning routine’ to ‘personal wellbeing investment.’ Channel mix should be weighted 60% brand building / 40% activation per Binet & Field. Budget allocation should reflect ESOV principles. Deliverable should include key price positioning strategy, core packaging refresh recommendations, and 3 category entry points to trigger purchase.”
I’ll let you take these prompts and try them out for yourself, but I think it’s clear that one of these is going to be slightly more robust than the other. Again, because AI takes your brief and makes it more.
In these examples, you have make it more heartwarming, or make it more emotional catalyst for connection with key frames and moments, or make it more a list of tactics you could do for cereal, or make it more strategically sound, with consideration for current market landscape and key principles for brand growth.
What we’re getting to then is that whilst AI has lowered the barriers to starting, it also exaggerates your strengths and gaps you bring to a task. If you are vague or surface-level in your prompts then AI is going to multiply that. If you bring depth, taste, and specificity to your prompts, AI is going to multiply that.
AI then isn’t the creative. Your brief is.
YOUR LIVED EXPERIENCE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER
On my first day of uni back in 2012, the department head for English Literature and Language shared that in order to develop critical thinking, we need to“read laterally along the shelf”. This has stuck with me for 13 years and counting, and is the reason I read lots, watch the full range of films from horror to rom-com, even get curious about Vikings to the extent that I save Viking tattoo designs, watch Viking TV shows and go to Viking ritual music gigs. For me that phrase wasn’t just about books, it was about intentionally exposing yourself to multiple perspectives, and to dig deep into topics.
A more relatable example I can think of is how, ‘I don’t have time to watch TV’ used to be this sort of weird status symbol. Yet now, I see it as the people who can make the time to watch human-crafted stories on the box in their living room are now closer to the human experience. Today’s stories are reflections of broader societal and cultural attitudes; those watching these stories are the ones building up richer mental models to refer back to.
Basically, watching TV is a way to train your taste.
One of the most evident ways we can see this shift towards more humanity is in the increase in Reddit MAUs (which have increased nearly 50% since 2022!). There are 2 things driving this, the first is an update Google made as part of their partnership with Reddit that has increased Reddit’s rankings in search results (presumably to bring more opinions and human reviews below the AI generated search results). The second is because people are wanting to see what real people are saying, and are adding “+reddit” to their Google searches. It’s a funny sort of consequence of the explosion of AI, more AI-generated content has meant more actively seeking out of real conversations.
Continuing on this train of thought, I think about UGC; human reviews and human photos (writing human this many times can’t be good…) are going to be even more important, especially when you are making a considered decision. When I think about the customer experience of choosing a hotel, or buying a house, or renting an Airbnb, or buying furniture, historically, UGC is somewhere at the bottom, likely because UGC images are kinda ugly and not really in line with brand guidelines (e.g can be blurry, have mess in the background, or people might have accepted the Ts&Cs for their images to be used, but then actually don't want their images blasted across a global website...). But now reviews and photos and videos taken by people who have had the real experience are going to have even greater weight. It feels like we're shifting from the experience the brand wants you to have (which might be enhanced with AI imagery or AI descriptions), and now even more so into the experience the customer wants to have.
AI can make more of something, but it’s the lived experience that really gives that something meaning.
KNOW YOUR LIMITS
This brings me on to my point that we need real human creatives more than ever. Humans have taste, they have lived experiences, they understand cultural nuances, they have lateral thinking, they have critical thinking, they know what good looks like.
I think of my own experience as a creative person. I’ve had ideas born out of:
- Reading niche articles on lifts as liminal spaces.
- Being a member of the #lifeprotips subreddit.
- Having a conversation with my partner who is in a completely different line of work.
And when I use AI tools, I see it as me training them on my taste.
Why do I do this? Because AI knows all the things you could do, but only you know all the things that you don’t want to do.
The human is providing the guardrails. AI might know how to come up with creative ideas, but it doesn’t know that it needs to get inspiration from the fringes of culture, or specifically from the 80s, or from that music album cover art.
When the opportunity is endless and limitless, it's about providing the boundaries in which the opportunity is realised. I almost see it as creating your own walled garden of curiosities to play in.
Right, you have made it to the end! Here’s 3 things I’m hoping you took away:
WALK AWAY WITH THESE 3 THINGS
AI is a multiplier of your brief. Shit in, shit out, and vice versa.
Your lived experience is critical to building rich mental models to refer back to, and helps create better stories.
Limits, rules, guardrails, whatever you want to call them, are the conditions for creativity. (Ogilvy said this before, and it seems more necessary now…)
AI is creating loads of exciting possibilities, but AI doesn’t know what matters like you do. If you want to put stuff out into the world that lasts longer than a scroll of a thumb, I would encourage you to train your AI on your taste.