Announcing "LLMs and Eloquence"
Hi everyone,
It's been a long while since we've shared a new post on The Story is the Strategy. I hope you’ve been keeping well.
I've been thinking a lot about the advent of AI as it pertains to writing. I'm right in the thick of it at Google, and I have some new thoughts to share on how you can use these tools to your advantage by applying some of the principles we’ve explored here.
I’ve just launched a new newsletter about it on LinkedIn called “LLMs and Eloquence.” If that sounds interesting to you, please consider subscribing!
I’d love to hear from you, especially if there are any questions or topics you’d like this newsletter to address.
It lives on LinkedIn for now, but if there’s enough interest I’ll move it to the open web like this one.
Hope to see you there! If you want a sneak peek, here’s the text of the inaugural post:
Less than two years after the launch of ChatGPT, we’re already living in a world where AI can write everything from emails to novels.
Dystopia? Hardly. I write for a living, and I couldn’t be more excited. AI is unlocking faster, more effective communication for overworked professionals everywhere. The thrill (and relief!) of delegating that painful first draft is real - and it’s something we should all embrace.
But we need to be smart about how we use these powerful tools. It’s tempting to think that AI might render expertise in writing obsolete. The truth is, in the age of AI, understanding what constitutes "good" writing is more critical than ever.
One problem I’m sure you’ve noticed is the sheer volume of so-so AI writing flooding the internet. Not terrible, but not memorable. That sea of sameness is making it harder to stand out.
Turns out that for the qualities that make writing sing - persuasion, nuance, and originality - AI needs strong guidance to deliver the good stuff. This presents a significant opportunity for the people who know how to use the tools effectively.
I want to help you be one of those people. Every single time we communicate at work, we’re making an impression on our colleagues and it needs to be as strong as possible.
Let me give you an example. At Google, we use business snippets in our internal comms to share key information about the business. Fun fact for internet geeks: these snippets are a distant cousin of the “rich snippets” of text you see under the blue links in your search results, describing the web page you’re about to click on.
Snippets are really important at Google - but they’re not fun to write. It’s a pretty unforgiving format that requires you to strip out everything but the essential. You might need to summarize a whole marketing campaign in just a few lines. Mark Twain’s “I would’ve written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time” very much applies.
I’m seeing more and more of our teams use AI to prepare these snippets. That’s great, and the more people experimenting with AI tools, the better. But one early challenge we've found is that when you read a few AI-written snippets in a row, they can sound a little samey - lacking the spark and substance and human touch that truly capture attention. That’s a missed opportunity to stand out.
So how do you avoid the sea of sameness, while still reaping the benefits of AI? I think it begins with the concept of "creative judgment." Our traditional Product Marketing Manager job ladder at Google always emphasized this as a fundamental skill. PMMs aren’t expected to create every piece of marketing content from scratch (a truly impossible task). But they do need to be really good at recognizing and articulating what "great" looks like, guiding agencies and creatives to produce the high-quality work needed at scale.
In the age of AI, creative judgment isn't just a specialized skill for marketers; it's something we all need to cultivate. And the foundation of creative judgment is expertise.
That’s what I'll be exploring in this newsletter: the interplay of expertise, writing, and AI. How do we leverage our unique knowledge and perspectives to elevate AI-generated content from commodity to captivating? How do we ensure our voices stand out?
If you’re interested, please subscribe to this new newsletter ("LLMs and Eloquence") for more. And I’d love to hear your experiences and perspective in the comments below.