5 things to keep in mind

1. Your idea is the key that starts the engine

   
   Don’t think you can just go to the LLM of your choice and say “hey, I’m coming up with ideas for a shoe brand that is targeting tweens on tiktok, give me some ideas” and come away with anything good. I mean, ok, you could win the lottery, I guess, but you’d have as much luck googling that. The best way I’ve found is to give it context - and then talk to it about YOUR ideas. Ask it how it could build on it. Ask it what it thinks it’s missing, or how it could be improved. Ask it to create more headlines based on ones you’ve developed. Ask it if it can come up with social ideas based on your concept. Help stress test your ideas and make them stronger. You can, absolutely, use it to come up with ideas, but know that they will be lowest hanging fruit type of ideas, and I’m guessing not up to your standards.

2. It’s a starting point, not a solution

   
   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.

   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.

3. Be open and transparent

   
   Is your first instinct to say “no” if someone asks if an image or copy is AI generated - and it is, then you have a problem. If something looks or sounds like AI and you try to pass it off as human, you’re going to be busted, so just be honest. It’s a tool to help get your ideas out, BUT see points 1 and 2.

   I make a point of being overly transparent about where and when I’ve used AI in my 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).

4. 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).

5. This is your work, not a robot’s work

   
   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. Anything produced with little to no human involvement is basically just a robotic content farm. Yuck.