Artificial intelligence (AI) has made rapid inroads into many areas of business and has become a game-changer for brands seeking innovation. In this article, Morgan Nicholas-Karpiel, Innovation & Content Strategy Advisor, reveals the pivotal role artificial intelligence can play in modern branding. Morgan shares insights on how AI-based tools can enhance brand consistency across various channels, the potential of AI for creative processes, and the ethical issues surrounding the use of AI in B2B copywriting and branding strategies as well as the future of human and AI collaboration in storytelling.
Olga Lany: How does AI ensure brand consistency across various channels and touchpoints?
Morgan Nicholas-Karpiel: Currently, it doesn’t do this well. We will have more AI-powered features in our tools that can help with this, and we have AI-boosted platforms like Canva, or Adobe Express that can help to ensure that our creative output fits within our brand guidelines. I also expect that the large Foundational models will be able to assume many key elements of this role in the future, but we’re not quite there yet.
The best way we have to ensure consistency, when working with Foundational models like GPT 4o or Gemini 1.5 is to use consistent prompts that limit the parameters of the output we will get back to create things like copy or text, or images and video as we begin to use more multimodal features. And, of course, we also need to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to safeguard the security of our data when doing that.
Olga Lany: Do you believe AI can be truly creative, or do you think creativity is a uniquely human trait? And what scenarios do you think a human touch is irreplaceable in copywriting?
Morgan Nicholas-Karpiel: This depends on how you define creativity. Can a foundational model like GTP4o or Gemini 1.5 suggest approaches to a design or storytelling problem that are both unexpected and fit the needs of a particular project? Yes, they can both do that currently, and they can roll through iterations at a pace that can drastically reduce the time it takes to conceptualize and begin producing high-quality work. Currently, these models don’t produce what I might consider to be finished work. The level of writing is fine for informational purposes, but it frequently lacks a differentiating voice or the kind of storytelling elements that work in a real-world context. That said, they are rapidly accelerating in capabilities.
Soon, I can see the role of a specialist (copywriter or other) in the creative industries changing to become more focused on collaboration, merging AI and human storytelling techniques to ensure that all work produced is sufficiently differentiated, tailored to the needs of the client, and connects with readers and audiences in the most powerful way that it can.
Instead of Copywriters, you may see something like Communication Strategists, people who can recognize great storytelling and who understand how, when, and where to apply it, and how to tune automation within that process to ensure that the human quality of the message remains.
Olga Lany: Can you discuss any ethical considerations or limitations you’ve encountered while using AI in B2B copywriting and branding strategies?
Morgan Nicholas-Karpiel: From my perspective, brands need to understand that while Narrow AI (Midjourney, Adobe Express) may be structured and effective tools for boosting productivity, Foundational AI models (GPT4o, Gemini 1.5) are entirely different. Both types of AI present significant challenges, in terms of ethics and branding.
An easy way to think about this is that Narrow AI models have a narrower field of potential problems (possible copyright infringement, commercial use restrictions, regulations on social media channels, human bias, or machine bias, for example). All of these are real concerns that need to be handled as part of an overall AI Strategy, but they do not include the broader concerns that apply to more capable systems.
While Foundational AI models (GPT 4o, Claude, or Gemini 1.5) have many of the same ethical problems that Narrow AI models do, they also present far more complex issues that may reflect on our brands. We can see this in the backlash Apple just experienced while launching a video to promote the iPad Pro. This commercial features the instruments of human creativity being smashed into the shape of an iPad, which triggered the creative ire of dozens of celebrities and thousands of customers who felt that it celebrated what unethical technology developers (namely in the field of AI) are currently doing to the human experience.
Brands that decide to integrate powerful, multimodal AI models into their workflows have to contend with how that decision will affect the human perception of their brand and its values. Recent studies have shown that we place less value on the creative work or brand experiences created by AI when we can detect them. It also goes without saying that if we are replacing human talent with AI, we can expect it to raise ethical questions. How can ensure that our use of AI is both ethical and structured in a way that adds to brand value, rather than diminishing it? Perhaps, as the use of AI becomes ubiquitous and societies around the world adjust successfully to this new reality, these questions become less important. But for this period of transition, they need to be addressed in the way we communicate to our audiences. To address ethical concerns, we first need to be honest about how we use AI within our organizations and why. That needs to be a transparent conversation we have with our target audiences.