The Case Against AI
It’s not that we don’t appreciate the superpowers of AI.
However, we do find it useful, on occasion, to swim against the tidal logic of AI—the endless clarity and triplets and predictable syntax of ChatGPT that lulls our human minds to sleep with its spotless, bloodless prose. In this new era of sanitized, pallid marketing copy, we’re searching for some old-fashioned, red meat lyricism. Some essential combination of human emotion and grit or a bizarre combo of tone and wit that makes us nearly jump out of our Pumas.
We’d be lying if we said we didn’t use AI in the day-to-day grind of running a small business. We find it to be a timesaver for creating structures and frameworks to help keep the Cowbird machine afloat. If we need a container for a piece of writing—a strong outline for a Case Study or a template for an Instagram carousel—we may tap into AI to see what it suggests. We may consult AI as a thesaurus or use it to review a paragraph for clarity. We may use it to generate a complex framework for a communications campaign. However, when it comes to building language and visuals that tap into the flickering, bald heart of a brand, we trust our human minds to craft something odd. An aberration, a spiritual heist to stop us dead and let us tap into the transpiration of humanity with its wistfulness, nostalgia, delight, miseries, energy and endless absurdity.
What is branding if not emotion, parceled and shipped? Cartier wants to sell us expensive jewelry—God bless them. They’ve been doing it for over a century and a half—but when they put a bejeweled panthère on a bracelet, with one, unblinking, all-knowing eye set in obsidian—what they really selling? Luxury, frill, indulgence, adornment. The feeling of being in a different tax bracket. It’s the passion people crave, the sensation, not the panthère. We could live full, successful lives without donning this particular, lumbering, deeply weird bracelet; but in a world of mundanity, Cartier seeks to crack us from our stupor and deliver us from our ordinariness with the very thing-ness of its jewelry, with its diamond spots and the promise of optimism and joy.
It's genius. And all of us are open to it deep within our abdomens. We are likely not even fully conscious of it—that’s the sorcery of branding. Maybe for you, it’s not a bracelet. Maybe it’s a $300 cooler that swears you’re still fun on the weekends. Maybe it’s a $3,000 gold Dior knit twin set that lets you distance yourself magnificently from your midwestern roots. Whatever the occasion or the individual, there is something out there that makes us feel the word crave. But the craving doesn’t come from the object or the service, it comes from the idea, the impression, the way it’s presented to us. Tell me that a robot can elicit this type of response.
Does feeling drive thought? Is there a subconscious, elemental reaction in our bodies that our brains then sculpt into ideas that then crystalize into opinions? If this is true, then how can an inanimate binary instrument truly speak to us on a human level? How can AI, in whatever form, create authentic marketing copy? How can it understand the emotions that drive human behavior and experience? These are questions we ask ourselves when it’s 4:35pm on a Thursday and we’re brainstorming much too late in the day to generate any answers. (That’s because we’re human, and, as a result, tired.) Though we can’t necessarily answer these questions, these are the impulses that make us want to build an atmosphere with our wits and human darkness, rather than simply generating one using AI.
A client recently came to us with an idea for a new business. She presented us with a logo generated from ChatGPT using information about her business that she had also elicited from ChatGPT. It was a closed loop of insanity and please believe that the logo she conjured reflected this. It looked like a sadder, impaired YMCA logo, but without the recognition or soft, nostalgic chlorine smell that the YMCA conjures. After an extensive branding exercise (because as we know, a brand is more than just a logo) where we interrogated the client about the intention behind her business, the audience she was targeting, the hopes and vision she had for her new company, then and only then, could we start designing a brand that we could connect with, that we understood beyond the practical logistics of how much she was charging her clients or what her margins would be. It is worth noting that the brand we built looked nothing like a dystopian YMCA, but rather like an elegant, upscale yacht club that spoke to the purpose and sleekness of her brand and incorporated nods to the salted, wind-in-the-hair experience that came from her maritime background.
We are of the humanities, here at Cowbird. We can’t help it. Perhaps in a different world, we would have gone to business school rather than art school or we would delight in the inventiveness of theoretical calculus. But the truth is, we’re very tapped into the visceral, weird experience of being human. We’re always thinking about how to connect with our fellow beings in conversation and through the subconscious pull of a product or a service. In fact, one of the questions that we ask our clients is “What are you really selling?” For example, was our client selling a leadership course or a sense of relief from the chaos of managing an unproductive, chaotic staff at a large organization?
As we lurch into an era of burgeoning technologies that finds us increasingly isolated from our fellow humans and allows us to rely on machinery to create full grammatical sentences that stand in for our own thoughts and emotions, we find ourselves nostalgic for a certain kind of old-fashioned thought process. One that leads logically from inception to discovery to strategy to implementation. It may be human, and as a result, it may take a bit longer; it may wander into a few cul-de-sacs and false starts, but we find that it ultimately allows us to speak to the people (not the machines) that are on the other end of the products and services our clients are selling. And that makes us different; maybe a bit more sensitive. Definitely more human.