Like seemingly half the people on my LinkedIn feed, I was amused to see this recent headline in the Wall Street Journal:
(I was also amused to see that the Wall Street Journal people add a period after “Journal” in their masthead, which I had never noticed before and which strikes me as weird and unnecessary. But I digress.)
Humans are hard-wired to respond to stories. No child in the history of time has ever asked to “hear some content” at bedtime. We want a beginning, a middle, and an end. We want to maybe laugh or cry a little bit. We want a message. We want meaning and connection.
And if you are a business, even if you are B2B, your potential customers want to know how your story fits into theirs. Sure, they want the specs of what you do and how you do it, but they also need to know that you mesh with how they see themselves. And if you don’t pull this off, they’re probably not going to want to do business with you.
There is no shame in not having strong storytellers on staff. You’re busy running your business, and some of the most fascinating people in the world aren’t great at expressing themselves in writing. This is why professional ghostwriters exist. But don’t make the mistake of thinking you can throw some ideas into a prompt and get a really compelling story from an AI tool. You won’t.
You will get words, certainly – SO many words (ChatGPT often reminds me of a nervous blind date who just doesn’t know when to stop rambling). But they aren’t going to be words that resonate with people, or move them or – and this is key – incline them to give you their money.
Great stories tend to involve nuance, irony, suspense, surprise, humor, or some combination of these. At the very least, you need originality and creativity. AI is terrible at all of these things.
AI tools can generate text, sure. But they’re not good storytellers. Invite them to join you around the campfire at your peril.
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