If you’re on the creative side of the communication game, AI has pretty much taken over most career-related conversations. With good reason.
Outputs—visual, text, all of it—look sharp. And not too long ago, the speed alone would have been enough to impress.
But I’m a conceptual copywriter with a couple of decades of experience. That comes with a built-in BS detector, and an ear for “saying a whole lot of nothing.” To me, AI is full of it—it sounds dumb. And the more I work with it, the more it sticks out.
To be clear—AI isn’t dumb at all, if we’re measuring smarts on being efficient from a craft perspective. Everything is fast, clean, correct. But in terms of cutting my workload by making decisions I would make intuitively—what argument to bring up, or what tone to take and when—it’s laughably inept.
AI likes sitting on fences
Try AI in your workflow for any length of time, and you start to see an important pattern—you can’t pin it down on anything.
It will present options and provide the language around any direction you want to take—but it won’t actually decide that direction. It just follows your lead.
Sometimes that’s genuinely helpful—rationalizing an idea or concept for me more quickly than I could type it is one way. Or assessing the positives and risks of an idea, or expanding my options—AI is efficient at that as well. As long as it is generating, it’s in its comfort zone.
But it isn’t really being creative as I know it. It can’t. Creatives choose what to emphasize, what to skip, and what to push or sacrifice—that’s our intelligence. It’s our judgement. We intuit choices that make sense, based on our experience and expertise, because the outcome matters.
And that’s why AI looks and sounds dumb to us. It offers clean, approvable outputs, options and variations, and very convincing reasoning for everything it generates. But it can’t judge, and it doesn’t care beyond solving the prompt request. There’s nothing at stake for it.
The interesting thing is how we’re responding. The reaction tends to swing between two extremes: amazement at its competence, or frustration at its shallowness.
Only you care if AI looks dumb
Both reactions miss the point. AI isn’t dumb. It just can’t make decisions. It is replacing parts of what I do, but only as it relates to execution. It writes faster and with fewer grammatical or spelling mistakes than I’ll ever be able to. But coming up with a good idea, testing it, and deciding what to do—that’s still all me.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable: when you give AI clear direction, it will execute flawlessly in the direction you’ve pointed. Which means it will also expand on weak ideas endlessly and confidently.
That’s where it starts to feel dumb for a seasoned creative. There’s a point when you stop and realize—I’ve been lured to the dull side. The good news is you recognized it and found another way forward. The bad news is there may be a lot of less experienced AI users scaling soft concepts in the coming years.
I will continue to use AI as part of my natural workflow. I’ll just try not to expect it to be something it isn’t. And stay aware that I lead, it follows, and that’s how it’s meant to be.
Which, of course, is the hard part: it generates so smoothly, it’s easy to forget it just doesn’t care.
Brand narrative strategy and copy 