Sheelagh Caygill and Mariya Delano, CEO of Kalyna Marketing, explore the evolving role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing and creativity.

Mariya discusses how she integrates AI into workflows. Kalyna Marketing uses AI for streamlining admin tasks, automating repetitive processes, and enhancing efficiency in areas such as data analysis, scheduling, and customer segmentation.

But Mariya warns that marketers and content creators who rely too heavily on AI for content creation are taking huge risks with their own or a client's business.

Mariya uses the Greek framework of the types of persuasionin her analysis of the current state of gen AI: logos and pathos. Logos was logic, facts, and information while pathos was emotion and feeling.

Mariya sees so many marketers missing the value of the pathos, which makes content worthwhile. Gen AI can make content look and feel good, but nobody remembers it. It feels empty.

AI content, she says, is missing the heart, the pathos, and the feeling.

AI is never going to get the best results or deliver the things that truly make an impact. You can't have brand recognition, brand authority, or long-term brand trust with AI, because it's regurgitating information from everybody else,  whether it be a Nabokov novel in the 50s or Joe Smith writing a blog post three months ago in your competitor's blog.

Mariya explains that gen AI lacks cohesive emotion driving the creative process. With a human heart is behind creation, the creative process is tied together through the emotion of the writer, the artist, or the editor.

Resources & links from Mariya:

From Alex Birkett on the business and SEO impacts of AI use and what will matter in content going forward.

By Julie Angwin, breaking down hype around AI and common myths promoted by AI vendors.

MIT Tech Review article by Scott J Mulligan about how AI output quality reduces when it's trained on poor quality materials, and that as time goes on and more of the internet becomes AI generated, the quality of AI tools will likely go down .

Research from Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). DAIR looks at AI a lot more critically and holistically in terms of harms to marginalized populations, impact on human lives, and imagining more ethical, alternative frameworks for AI. 

ThreatLabs AI Security report with good stats about the amount of cybersecurity issues from common AI tools, and the second section detailing how AI use can be security threats is extremely interesting for any marketer.

Mariya sees this trend playing out over and over - namely the ways that authenticity on the internet (specifically on YouTube) got commodified and emulated to the point of losing the initial spark and connection with creators that made this kind of content effective to begin with. This video is an older essay on the subject.

"No One Makes Good Video Essays Anymore" - a video about commodification of educational content, the point of an essay, and how artistic sensibilities and taste can get harmed while chasing algorithms.

A masterful short YouTube video on a conservative Twitter cartoon and DOGE, but it actually makes one of the most profound points about AI - as the video goes on, the creator strips more and more parts of it that are "inefficient", stripping it down to the laziest, simplest to produce version by the end. Mariya got chills seeing how much the quality dropped and how much the magic disappeared. "When we automate things because they don't seem essential, this is the kind of appeal our work loses," she observes.

A LinkedIn article from Mark Stouse, noting how our current AI technology reflects what is easiest to make, not what might be most helpful and that trying to make computers approximate human intelligence is limiting, thinking about what we can get computers to do to COMPLEMENT humans instead is much more interesting and valuable.

The AI Quality Coup - by Julie Zhuo asks what constitutes quality work in the age of AI.