Is AI ruining B2B creativity? Your questions answered

I recently hosted a session at PRmoment’s B2B PR Forum, which asked a fairly provocative question: Is AI ruining B2B creativity? We had a brilliant discussion, with plenty of audience questions, but unfortunately I couldn't get to all of them in the time available. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to answer them here and go into a little more depth on some of the issues we discussed.

Can AI create a brand’s positioning, or does that still need to come from humans?

We definitely use AI when developing brand positioning. But I would never trust it to create that positioning from scratch.

The truth is that good brand positioning comes from your company culture and your audience's needs. And understanding both of those requires talking to actual people.

For me, the process starts with interviews. Spokesperson soapbox calls, conversations with the CEO and getting a proper feel for what makes the business different. You need to understand what the reality is before you can work out what feels authentic for your brand. 

Then there's the audience research. Again, that needs to go beyond asking ChatGPT what people think.

For Wildfire, we've developed our own synthetic audiences called Sparks. They're incredibly useful, but only because we regularly feed them original audience research and data from our own surveys. That human insight is the only reason why they provide any value. Just telling ChatGPT, "Take on the persona of my target audience", isn't good enough.

So yes, AI absolutely has a role in positioning. But ultimately, it's still a very human process. And I think it should stay that way.

How can synthetic audiences help test creative ideas, and what still needs checking with real people?

For me, two of the most important qualities of any creative idea are whether it's distinctive and memorable.

AI can be very useful for the first of those. You can use it to research what competitors are doing, identify common approaches in your industry and explore whether your supposedly original campaign has already been done a hundred times.

Done well, that can be incredibly valuable. There's nothing worse than spending weeks developing an exciting idea only to discover a competitor did something almost identical last year.

But memorability is much harder. ChatGPT will confidently tell you whether something is creative, original or likely to stand out. The problem is that, when you look at what it recommends, you quickly realise it often has terrible taste.

What AI considers original or exciting can be frequently clichéd. Sometimes it's downright crap.

That might improve over time, but right now I wouldn't trust a synthetic audience to tell me definitively whether a campaign will be remembered by real people. For that, you need real human judgement, ideally from your actual audience.

How should communicators respond when senior leaders use AI to challenge creative ideas or question budgets?

Personally, I think this is going to become a real problem over the next few years. If we don’t manage it well, then AI could rapidly become the world’s most powerful tool for saying no to good ideas.

If someone — anyone — doesn’t like an idea or an approach, they can now put it into Claude or ChatGPT and ask for a long list of reasons why it won't work. And AI will happily oblige.

Of course, you could ask the same tool to explain why the campaign is brilliant and deserves twice the investment. It'll probably give you an equally convincing answer. But this is the problem. AI can be very good at helping rationalise any decision someone has already made.

To get round it, my advice to communicators is to stop treating AI-generated criticism as independent expert judgement.

Ask what evidence supports the criticism. Is it based on actual audience insight, a genuine commercial concern or simply a plausible-sounding argument generated by a language model?

Generally, I think we also need to get better at explaining the thinking behind our recommendations. Show the audience insight, the strategic reasoning and the evidence that led you to the idea. Make it harder for someone to dismiss weeks of thinking with a 30-second prompt.

Ultimately, the most important thing is to develop a culture that preserves respect for professional expertise. You wouldn't expect a CEO to dismiss their lawyer's advice because ChatGPT disagreed. Creative and communications expertise deserves a serious conversation too.

Could labelling things as '100% human-made' become a competitive advantage?

I’ve heard this suggested a few times, but I’m not a fan. I don't think the future will be to compete with AI by claiming that purely human content is automatically better. There's plenty of 100% human-made work out there that's just as bad as any AI slop.

While I don’t want us to start labelling AI content, I think agencies, clients, and internal teams should be clear about where AI is used, where it isn't, and what the expectations are. And that goes both ways.

If a client takes something I've spent weeks developing, drops it into ChatGPT and asks it to 'review this' without reading it themselves, I'd question whether they respect me as a consultant or a creative professional.

That's not a particularly healthy working relationship. And I think the work will suffer as a result.

Equally, if a client gives me detailed, thoughtful feedback and I simply paste it into ChatGPT with the instruction 'make these edits', I'm showing the same lack of respect for their expertise.

We should be listening to each other as professionals.

So I'm much more interested in being transparent about the process than putting a '100% human' sticker on the finished product.

How can human creativity compete when journalists are increasingly using AI to screen PR pitches?

If journalists start relying on AI to decide which stories are worth reading, some brilliant ideas could be missed simply because they were presented in a poorly worded email. And that's bad for journalism.

That said, I get that most journalists are now being bombarded with hundreds of low-quality AI-generated pitches, and the result of that is journalists having to use more automation to wade through it all.

But there should be an important distinction between filtering obvious spam and deciding whether an idea is interesting.

Judging what makes a good story is a journalist's job. It requires instinct, curiosity, cultural understanding and a feel for what readers will care about. Those are professional skills. And I worry that outsourcing them to AI could make journalism less interesting, just as outsourcing creative decisions could make PR less creative.

So for me, the answer for PR professionals isn't to start writing pitches that appeal to algorithms. It's to keep developing genuinely interesting stories and building relationships with journalists who recognise them.

With shrinking teams and budgets, how can we protect time for creativity rather than defaulting to AI?

During a recent roundtable with tech marketers, I asked everyone when they felt most creative. Interestingly, nobody said sitting in front of ChatGPT. One person gave an answer I absolutely loved: "I highly recommend a power cut." They'd lost power, had no laptop and couldn't even hotspot their phone. Apparently, they got more creative thinking done than they’d achieved in months.

Overstimulation is the enemy of originality. There's a reason we often have our best ideas in the shower or on a walk. Our brains need space to wander and make unexpected connections. Brainstorming with AI gives us an infinite stream of suggestions and things to react to, and that overstimulation can actually make those eureka moments harder to achieve.

So my advice is to deliberately build some thinking time into the creative process, even when you're busy. Next time you get a brief, print it out before putting it into the robot. Read it, scribble some notes and then go somewhere without a screen. Get a coffee, go for a walk or talk to another human being. Give yourself a chance to develop your own ideas.

With shrinking budgets and teams, we need to be smarter about how we use AI to save time for those quiet moments. I think we've got our priorities backwards. It's amazing how many people use AI to generate creative campaign ideas while still manually updating spreadsheets, taking meeting notes, and doing basic admin. Surely that's the stuff we should be automating? Use AI to do the boring stuff, so you've got more time to be creative.

Are junior PR professionals at risk of losing the ability to think creatively if they become too reliant on AI?

It's a real concern. There's some fantastic young talent in our industry, but we need to nurture it. And that means taking the time to teach people the fundamentals, rather than simply handing them ChatGPT and telling them to get on with it. 

Get junior colleagues shadowing experienced people. Show them how you approach a brief, develop ideas and make decisions. And absolutely teach them how to use AI. They need to understand how to get the best out of these tools, recognise their limitations and challenge what they produce. If AI takes away some of the tasks juniors traditionally learned from, we need to be much more deliberate about how they develop those skills.

But above all, help them develop their own taste. Encourage them to judge campaigns, read publications like PRmoment and CreativeMoment, study great creative work and get involved in the industry. Creativity isn't just about generating ideas. It's about recognising which ideas are worth pursuing. As leaders, we need to give junior colleagues interesting work and opportunities to think independently.

Is AI-generated content creating a race to the bottom, similar to the rise of 24-hour news?

I do worry that it is. And I say that as someone who uses AI to develop content every day.

The era of AI slop that we’re currently living through reminds me of when blogging and Web 2.0 arrived. Everyone was so excited about the democratisation of publishing. Suddenly, anyone could have a blog, share their opinions and become a publisher.

But it wasn’t long before the blogosphere filled up with poorly written nonsense, misinformation and fake news. We quickly realised that just because everyone could publish something, that didn't make everyone a journalist. Journalism is a discipline, and it requires skill, judgement and experience.

I think AI is doing something similar for creativity. Suddenly, anyone can make an interactive website, produce a video or develop a campaign concept without years of technical training. But being able to generate creative work doesn't automatically make someone a professional creative. That requires craft, taste and taking pride in what you produce. Again, it’s a discipline.

The danger is that businesses start confusing the ability to produce something with the ability to produce something good. And when everyone is producing more content, faster and cheaper, quality risks becoming an afterthought.

My advice is to embrace the tools, but don't neglect your discipline. Read more, learn from people outside your industry and study great creative work. Develop your taste and be willing to experiment and get things wrong. If AI makes it easier for everyone to create, the ability to recognise and produce genuinely good creative work becomes more valuable, not less.