As more of the world turns to generative AI (GenAI) to produce blog posts, LinkedIn posts, reports and much more, there is an even more pressing need for “premium thought, creativity, individuality — real critical thinking”, according to PwC UK head of thought leadership and content Will Sturgeon, at Collective Content’s event ‘Red lines: GenAI, content and you’.
Today’s in-person audience was made up of senior content and communications professionals at B2B technology and professional services companies — just the people with a remit to stand out and show the value that only their company can bring.
Also speaking at the event, Collective Content senior editor Shirley Siluk reminded everyone that GenAI is a “pattern-matching, word association probability engine”, and isn’t real intelligence or thought in any traditional sense.
This has knock-on effects for creativity. One audience member posed the question: How do we maintain authentic brand voice and prevent the loss of the human touch as marketing and communications experts?
Our panellists agreed that it’s about more than keeping humans “in the loop” (a phrase we hear often), but making sure humans – with our experience, viewpoints and very human fallibility – are the drivers of creativity.
PwC’s Sturgeon gave the example of using ChatPwC (the firm’s in-house LLM-powered chatbot, a product of a deep relationship with ChatGPT owner OpenAI) for the first pass at a glossary of terms – knowing that PwC experts would then get the selections and definitions right.
One audience member from a large cloud and software company reinforced this. He said: “Copywriting is the last thing you should use AI for.”
Another attendee from a GSI spoke about using GenAI to remove distractions that hurt human creativity. She said that such tools could be useful for eliminating things like scheduling meetings, finding internal data and other repetitive but necessary work – if that gave her more time to think, research and write.
We’ll be sharing more insights from ‘Red lines: GenAI, content and you’ on our LinkedIn page and bringing you news of upcoming sense-making events in 2025. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay in touch.
