We have all felt that wave of “meh” after reading a bland AI-generated draft.
You attach your content brief and enter a detailed prompt into the box, hit enter, and wait. Seconds later, you get back 500 words and 100 of them are marketing clichés and buzzwords. The grammar is perfect. Too perfect. The structure is clean. The piece overall is … well, it says absolutely nothing.
When our teams use AI without strict brand guardrails, it defaults to the harmless average. It gives us marketing soup because nobody taught it what to add and what to leave out.
How to Prevent Mediocre AI
If we want AI tools to produce usable first drafts or even outline and ideate better, we have to give them clear dos and don’ts. Here are just a few tips to prevent mediocracy from creeping in.
- Ban the buzzwords. Tell the tool in your prompt that it cannot use words like delve, pivotal, revolutionize, or fast-paced world.
- Use concrete nouns and verbs. The writing should be able to stand on its own without excess adjectives and adverbs.
- Give clear instructions. Tell the model who to write like. Provide examples of your brand voice that wasn’t AI generated. Ask it to write like how your brand speaks.
AI is a powerful drafting tool, but it doesn’t have taste. It doesn’t know if something is good or bad. When we give our tools strict editorial rules and brand guidelines, we stop spending our afternoons fixing mediocre AI drafts and can spend more time to the creative and strategy work that we do best.