Dear Brands: Your ChatGPT is Showing

Organizations risk diluting their brands and alienating audiences as more humans understand and recognize the hallmarks of AI generated content.

Deciding whether and how to inform a friend or colleague that there is spinach in their teeth or a zipper undone can leave those with

Dear Brands: Your ChatGPT is showing.

sensitive souls like me with giant anxiety knots. For me and many others, our desire to help clashes with our drive to keep our friends emotionally comfortable. However, the job posts I show my students are blunt: “writers who don’t use ChatGPT needed…AI generated content failed to engage customers, client mad.”

One of the oldest social science theories explains that human beings adopt new ideas and technology in waves. The pleading for “real” writers suggests generative AI adoption is at the top of the wave between the early and late majority adopters. In other words, enough humans have interacted with ChatGPT to recognize its cadence and suspect its intent while another big group is just waking up to incorporating the technology into their communication strategy.

If you are in that second group, and integrating generative AI in content development is part of your 2024 plan, my gentle soul encourages you to ensure you have a strong writer running the machine. Otherwise, well, your ChatGPT is showing.

And, like spinach in the teeth, easy-to-spot generative AI leaves your audience wondering about your effort, competence and authenticity.

Here’s the hard part. Humans have created tone-deaf, ineffective, and flat messages well before generative AI adoption, and other humans may have been kinder in the past, well, because communication is hard.

But, now, audiences must determine whether the content that feels robotic is just a well-intentioned but human mistake or a lazy over reliance on AI. If your audience suspects the second, they might not be willing to tell you that your ChatGPT is showing, and they’ll just walk away.

Now, many strong writers use generative AI as a tool to amplify, not replace their skills. Furthermore forcing a strong writer to give up ChatGPT makes as much sense as telling an accomplished baker she can’t use her electric mixer. But, if you’ve handed over your newsletter to your intern with the instructions “just use AI,” you might want to review these classic ChatGPT tells.

Your article is mostly a list: Human beings absorb information in all sorts of formats, computers like lists without context. The old PowerPoint format of topic/bullet point kills communication because the slide only presents content in list form. Stories with a few tips move humans. Of course lists have purpose (see the article you are reading.) To persuade humans, writers need to use conversational tone and stories with their lists. Listicles are noise.

Your article reads like a high school essay: If your strategic communication content includes several of the known AI-tells such as the phrase “this paper will,” you are most likely either just getting your driver’s license or using ChatGPT. And, again, sometimes humans insert these tells on their own, but now the bar for quality writing is higher as humans become more distrustful of generative AI content.

Your article is heavy on stale metaphors: ChatGPT loves metaphors. Metaphors aren’t necessarily a problem unless everyone is using the same one….which…uh…is what ChatGPT does. For example, my students and I conducted a ChatGPT experiment where we used the technology to write LinkedIn bios. The majority of the content returned by ChatGPT had the phrase “harness the power of communication.” If we are all harnessing the power of communication, then none of us are truly harnessing the power of communication. On a related note, ChatGPT loves the word delve. Anytime I read “delve,” I start wondering.

The tone of your article does not match the tone of your human voice. In March of 2023, I observed an interesting trend. A few student emails that normally started with the overly casual and non-punctuated “hey I’m sick today what will I miss” suddenly changed to “Dear esteemed professor, I regret to inform you that I will not be able to attend today.”

I appreciated the increased formality and politeness, but I was fairly sure the student used AI especially when I had daily conversations with the author of the email whose writing suddenly gave a Gilded Age vibe. To be fair, perhaps the student desired to be polite and assumed a more formal email would communicate respect. Teachers like respect, and good teachers try to understand student intent first.

However, the real-world problem is that many humans, like me, can feel betrayed when they realized they are interacting with a computer when they expected a human. And, much like the technology adoption wave discussed above, those trickle of emails have turned into a steady stream of student generative AI submissions. An over reliance on generative AI might work for students with kind professors who allow re-dos, but the real-world is less forgiving.

Your audience is bombarded with messages, and those who have adopted the technology early — including your employees and customers — can tell the difference between you and the computer.

Many years ago I learned a technique for communicating uncomfortable “your zipper is down” messages in a way that aligned with my sensitive soul. A colleague who prided himself on his southern hospitality explained the response “I think you’d be more comfortable in a suit and tie,” was a gentle yet appropriate direction to someone who dressed for dinner in overly casual attire.

In that spirit, I offer the following to those just thinking about incorporating generative AI into their communication strategy. I think you may feel more comfortable entrusting that technology to a strong writer.

Need help solving a communication problem…an AI training…a keynote speaker…presentation coaching…content development? Contact me at eryn@travisnco.com