Gimme 5!
Ok! Here are five things you should know when you start using generative AI tools in you work:
No brief, no work. A prompt is what you put in - usually as text – to tell the generative AI tool what you want. It’s basically a creative brief. Garbage in, garbage out is the old saying, and it applies here as well. You need to have a clear goal, and develop your prompt with that in mind. Luckily, we are experts at getting briefings, and so we’re well situated to give them as well. If you want a little help in getting started, there are a ton of resources out there.
You’ll find prompts for any tool you want to use just by searching “prompts for (insert AI tool name here)” and you can find some great examples to get you started until you find what works best for you. I could go on and about prompting (and I will at some point). In the meantime, I beg you not to pay for prompts. You can do this yourself. Buying prompts seems like a pretty big scam to me for the most part, or at the very least, a tax on the insanely lazy. You can easily do this yourself and have more creative control over the input.
This is just a sketch. Any output you get, be it text or visuals, will not be perfect when it pops out. It might look like that when you first see it, but take a closer look. Does that man have 8 fingers and 1.5 eyes? Have you gotten the words “up your game” a few times in your social post? Check your ouput then check it again and then have someone else look at it. There is a good chance you’re going to have to touch A LOT of what you get out.
Also it’s good to be transparent where and when you’ve used AI in your process. Keep track of it like you would stock imagery, or quotes. My advice is to always treat generative AI output as a sketch, and rework it in your own voice or style. This is especially important with visual output, as copyright laws are kind of fluid here right now, and I would never pass along AI generated content to clients as something they could own (unless it was work where the concept had AI generated images as a part of it and then I would make sure to have legal all over that).
Take out the trash. Besides just making sure it looks or sounds good, you need to make sure that it’s RIGHT. The info you get could be 100% made up, so you need to check that it’s not just spouting bullshit that sounds good. AI is always fully confident in the results it gives you, and does not have an ethical filter for whether or not the output is true, true-ish, or false. Also, it’s been fed information, by humans, which means there is a good chance that there is a bias in some of the stuff you got out. Make sure that it’s all work that you stand behind before you pass it along.
Know when to walk away. Sometimes it’s just not helpful. And that’s fine. If you aren’t getting valuable output, and if it’s just complicating things, go do something else. Generative AI is not always the answer. You have a lot of other tools at your disposal - one of my favorites is to go hang out at a place where the people you want to talk to will be. No AI involved (except maybe with your scheduling).
The only good AI is Human-Led. I mean, if you’ve gotten this far, you see how it’s not just “put in some words, get some content, ok, off to the pub”. You need to be involved in every step of the way. There are some amazing things that it can do – but you are the real intelligence here. You are a better creative than any machine could ever be (more about that here). Anything produced with little to no human involvement is basically just a content farm. Yuck.
