AND THEN CAME THE BOOS

You’ve probably seen the video. On 8 May, at a graduation ceremony for the University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities, a commencement speaker called AI "the next industrial revolution." The room erupted in boos. 

The speaker looked genuinely surprised, turned to the people behind her on stage, and asked: "What happened?"

What happened was the clip went viral. Those boos obviously touched a nerve. And for brands using AI to produce ads, visuals or marketing copy, the lesson should have been jarringly obvious: your audience just might be on a different AI wavelength than you.   

BRANDS DON’T LIVE IN BUBBLES

The brands making a version of the same boo-boo are the ones living inside a bubble. Where AI-generated content has become so normalised that the people producing it have stopped noticing what it feels like to actually receive the stuff. 

Agencies, content teams, CMOs and clients are all diligently building from a new baseline of bland. But, y’know, it’s faster and cheaper. Ship it!

WHY FACTORY FARM YOUR BRAND VOICE? 

Factory farming solved a problem (not for animals, unfortunately). It made protein cheap, consistent, and scalable at a volume that traditional farming couldn't touch.

But it also got rid of all the differences. The flavour, the variation, methods and knowledge, peculiarities of place and conditions. All of that was processed out in the name of efficiency. 

AI content operates on the same principle. It’s trained on what already exists, which means it’s a machine for producing the probable. Feed it a brief about a sustainable skincare brand and it will magic up copy that sounds like every sustainable skincare brand. Ask it to write a welcome email and it will write the welcome email you’d expect from most welcome emails.

BRANDS WON’T HEAR THE BOOS

When 76% of marketing teams are using AI for content, that leads to a kind of homogenisation that no individual brand intended but all of them are contributing to. It’s naive to think that customers don’t notice the patterns. They may not be booing out loud, but they will have a sense that the brand isn't quite present. That whoever wrote to them wasn't really trying.

There’s value in your brand voice. Tonecraft is here to help you express it, so you don’t risk making it taste the same as everything else.