“Ritual Banality Avoidance” — Kelford Labs Daily
By being unique.
“This is an important storytelling move we might call ‘ritual banality avoidance.’ If we deny ourselves the crappo version of our story, a better version will (we aspirationally assume) present itself. To refuse to do the crappo thing is to strike a de facto blow for quality.”
— George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
This has become my philosophy on using AI for writing:
If we deny ourselves the easy out of just having ChatGPT do our marketing or content writing for us, a better version will present itself.
If we say to ourselves, “If AI can write it, it needn’t be written at all,” we force ourselves to come up with something only we could write.
Or we’ll at least come up with some angle or perspective on it that only we could articulate.
By all means, use AI as a tool, as a way of interrogating your own ideas or insights, but to hand over the creative process is to hand over the value creation.
It’s to admit to ourselves that we’re an unnecessary step in the process, and our clients might as well skip us and go straight to the AI. In time, being “good with AI” or being an expert prompter will be as useful as being “really good at Excel.”
It’s helpful, for sure, but it’s not unique. And it’s less impressive every day.
But if we insist on avoiding the crappo version (the AI version), and instead create something only we can create, in a way only we can, we strike a blow for quality.
And we demonstrate to our audience, our prospects, our clients, that we have something to offer beyond our access to an LLM and a few prompts we’ve picked up along the way.
We demonstrate we have a perspective worth seeing, value worth experiencing.
That we’re more than a prompt, we’re an expert.
Kelford Inc. shows experts the way to always knowing what to say.
