The danger isn't that AI will replace creative thinking, it’s that creatives will stop doing it. 

It’s gotten so easy to prompt agents for treatments that we’re in danger of losing the true fuel for powerful brands. Personal identification with consumers that can only come from immersing ourselves in their worlds. 

I’m two weeks into a strategy for a product that helps businesses connect technologies to smooth out workflow. Not something I deal with every day. So, I watch a day’s worth of YouTube videos from people who do. I binge three TV series in the category, read seven articles written by the CMO, and listen to her on three podcasts. 

And then the brokenness that happens when systems don’t connect lands. I close my eyes at night and see the audience struggling. I imagine a man wasting four hours at his desk trying to make two systems talk to each other. I can smell his coffee. I hear his fingers pounding the keyboard. I feel the monotonous dread of knowing there's no way to do the work that has to be done. Eventually, I become furious on his behalf. 

This is where ideas are born. 

Yet the race for speed makes it inevitable that some copywriters will try to leapfrog this crucial personal discovery with AI. Typing in parameters to get recommended treatments can only yield agglomerations of concepts others have already brought to market. So, adequate becomes the high bar while special (which comes from original imagination) leaves the arena. 

Sometimes we’ll be able to spot the telltale signs - you know, the rhythmic cadence and polished but-empty language ChatGPT produces when nobody bothers to challenge it – and send everyone back onto the discovery trail. But sometimes we won’t, and the shallow reasoning will work through. When that happens, the marketplace will put the weak ideas in their place.  

The problem won’t be technology. It will be mistaking instinct for insight. Filling the gaps with your own assumptions about a product and audience you haven’t done the work to understand. 

We don't present ideas because they're clever. We present ideas because they're true. 

The best ideas are so deeply insightful that people wonder why nobody thought of them sooner. They're simultaneously surprising and painfully obvious. They reveal something that was always there, hiding in plain sight. 

We’re not in the business of self-expression; we’re in the business of propelling client brands. And we can’t generate meaningful ideas until we’ve lost ourselves completely to become the consumer. Actors call it method acting. They disappear into people they've never been before. Our job is no different. 

When our ego drives the idea instead of the audience, we've already lost. And now we face an even bigger problem. We've started outsourcing the thinking. 

We’ll never learn anything that way. Because we can’t advocate for an audience we’ve never bothered to understand.