AI still needs a point of view.

The amount of times lately I’ve heard “I’ve run this through Claude, and he says …”

As though Claude is another person in the room, and one whose opinion carries rather a lot of weight.

I can understand the appeal. A fluent paragraph can be surprisingly persuasive, even when the thinking behind it is still half-baked, or not even there.

It has a beginning, a reassuring amount of structure and a conclusion that sounds as though somebody has considered the matter carefully. The awkward question is whether the underlying idea has received the same attention.

This is where I think creative judgement becomes particularly important when working with AI. Someone still has to decide what's worth saying, and whether the answer they've been given is actually any good.

Take live events, for example.

A small independent gig, a major festival and a corporate awards night could all be described as an unforgettable experience featuring electrifying entertainment if the brief is vague enough.

Technically, the copy might be fine. Enthusiastic, even.

It also tells the audience nothing.

And in live music particularly, there's a cultural consideration. The words and creative choices surrounding an event communicate something about the people behind it. If the language feels generic or completely disconnected from the audience, we risk suggesting that we don't really understand what we're promoting.

That matters whether the copy was written by a person or generated by AI.

I'm not particularly precious about using AI to explore an angle, organise rough thinking or find another way into a stubborn paragraph. There's plenty of value in that, particularly for smaller teams and operators who don't have the luxury of a dedicated person for every job.

But a brief that asks for "something engaging" leaves an enormous amount to question. Engaging for whom? What should someone understand, feel or do afterwards? What makes this particular thing worth their attention?

I'd rather spend more time answering those questions than producing ten variations of copy without a clear direction.

And once the variations exist, somebody still has to edit them.

Does this sound like something we'd actually say? Are the examples accurate? Have we lost an important caveat because the sentence sounded smoother without it? Does any of this actually help the person reading it?

That requires context, care and somebody willing to delete a sentence because it contributes very little.

I like the possibilities AI offers for creative experimentation. I also think there's a danger in mistaking the volume of material we can produce for the quality of the ideas behind it.

Speed is useful when it gives us more room to think. Less so when it simply produces a larger pile of same-same copy that doesn’t appeal to any of the audiences you’re trying to connect with.