Why There’s No Substance Behind Your Sparkle

Generative AI is technoglitter, the cheap bedazzling of marketing and entertainment with dubious results

As far as I’m concerned, generative AI is little more than the bedazzling of marketing and entertainment by feckless tech bros looking to make a quick buck. The technoglitter of the 21st century. A whole lot of sparkle with very little substance. Look what I did! Even though it looks difficult, complicated, and expensive, it took almost no work on my part and cost me next to nothing. Isn’t that something?

It is something. The technology is truly impressive. Someone taught a computer to create derivative art by stealing the work of real artists, and then you asked it to replicate their work using an amalgamation of ideas from disparate data points. It looks legit. It sounds professional. The problem is, you didn’t do anything. Like teaching a chimp to type or a dog to sing. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s all sizzle and no steak. All hat and no cattle.

I saw an ad today for some video editing product that boasted it could take your boring video and make it dynamic by throwing a bunch of editing gimmicks in as prepackaged filters and settings. Video editing for dummies, I suppose. Just another gimmick in a long line of cheap apps designed for self-proclaimed idiots. Fantastic. Because that’s definitely who I want to manage my brand.

An idiot with a cheap gimmick and no original ideas.

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Everyone is looking for a hack, a cheat code, a shortcut — because no one wants to do any real work. No one is interested in learning a craft. Get the computers to do the hard work. I’ll just come up with the ideas.

That sounds great, but one of the ways we learn, the way we develop new ideas, is by overcoming obstacles. When you go through life avoiding hardships, you are training yourself to take the path of least resistance, which will soon become boring, uninspired, and predictable. That way leads to death.

This might sound like an old man shaking his fist at the clouds, screaming about the fact that we old farts, the original gangsters, were abused by life, so you should be as well. But that’s not it at all. You need the resistance if you want to become strong, resilient, and capable. Otherwise, you’re going to crumble at the first sign of real trouble.

What happens when a client wants you to make minor changes? Can you do it, or are you locked into the template you borrowed from Canva because you don’t actually know how to design anything yourself? What about when your client finds out someone sold their competitor the same exact design you sold them when they thought they were getting an original? What about when you discover that you’re copying something famous because you don’t know the original?

That’s liable to be a difficult conversation.

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My biggest issue with Generative AI isn’t simply that it’s immoral, unethical, and inhuman—which it is. Not that it’s the cheap, lazy, scam that it pretends it isn’t. It’s that the people using it are going about the whole process backwards.

They’re essentially starting with an end product and trying to shoehorn some hacky idea into it by reverse engineering the process. If your ad looks and feels real, but could be turned into an Onion article simply by changing a few words, you’re barely going below the surface. There’s no substance to your claim. No bedrock for your foundation. It’s a house of cards, built on quicksand.

There is far too much hokey marketing being created that is a solution looking for a problem. It’s a creative idea looking for a home. I’ve been guilty of this, of course, as has any creative soul worth their salt. We’ve all fallen down the same rabbit hole, enamored by our own creative brilliance. Part of the problem is, it works. You can absolutely pawn off a good idea on some unsuspecting brand because it just happens to fit the moment. The real issue is, what comes next? Not just for you, but for the brand. Now what? When your strategy is nothing more than an elaborate tactic, the only goal is to sell it to the client. There’s no other payday.

It’s the reason why so many business people are distrustful of creative marketing departments. There’s often no long-term planning, no accountability for sales or profit, and not nearly enough integration with the business side of things. It’s all entertainment. Just glitter without the sticky factor.

We need to simplify things. Get back to basics. Have reasonable goals, rational strategies, and achievable tactics. Then execute as simply as possible, with as few moving parts as possible. Tell good stories. Keep them simple as well. Make it fun.

That’s right, it should be fun—for everyone.