Be creative

Near the end of our second conversation, I asked Mike King whether he was worried about machines that write rap lyrics. Mike has been a rapper and a technical SEO for most of his adult life, so if anyone was going to feel threatened from both sides at once, it was him.

He wasn't. He pointed out that AIs had already been used to make movies, and "they've been the most horrible movies you can possibly see."

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   Be creative

   The work machines find hardest is the work that surprises people. Lean into it.

   "There's just so much nuance to the human experience that I don't believe it'll ever replace everything that we do, especially creative things."

   Mike KingS01E03 Hear it 47:15

   > wrote a haiku. it compiled with warnings.

Computers would get good enough to replace a lot of what we do, he said, but not everything, "especially creative things."

Mike said that in 2017. Nine years and a lot of generated content later, I think it has held up better than most predictions from that year, mine included.

Mike isn't anti machine

This isn't a story about a creative bloke who hates spreadsheets. In the same episode Mike was showing me how he uses machine learning to guess and check without writing any code, and he'd trained a chatbot to answer his outreach emails (that story's in you can't automate empathy). He just knows which part he's handing over. The predictable stuff goes to the machine.

Machines are very good at the middle

My guess is that tools learn from what already exists, so they're good at producing the average of everything they've seen. Handy for a first draft or a product description. Nobody remembers the average though.

Oli Gardner gave me a lovely example of the middle going sideways. Unbounce's algorithm was suggesting emotional words that might lift conversions, and at 56:27 he admitted some odd ones crept in: for a webinar page, something like "telephone call or Yorkshire Terrier." Machines don't know when they've said something daft. People do, and people also know when something odd is actually brilliant.

Mike thought empathy would be even harder for machines than creativity, which is why you can't automate empathy got its own page.

Creativity starts with a better question

When Mike was relaunching UndergroundHipHop.com, he didn't want to know what rappers write their rhymes with. He wanted to know why (more of that in tell a compelling story).

Oli's version is fixing things around the house with a barbecue skewer. He loves solving a problem "by looking around the room" with whatever's in plain sight. Most good marketing ideas are like that. Nobody had the budget for the obvious answer, so somebody found a better one.

Before you publish anything a tool drafted, find the one sentence only your business could have written. If it isn't there, write it.

The bit you can't hand over

When Bobby asked me what Mike had taught us about digital empathy, my answer at 1:05:03 was a bit rambling, but the point was there. Mike runs two businesses, has a new daughter and is "a machine", and still he "couldn't automate all of it." A lot of it lives in his head.

Our piece on marketing automation makes the same point in a more sensible tone. You can read the full 2017 interview with Mike on kwasi.com.

Bobby, meanwhile, was running a pop-up ad for his rap lyric service: "Wanna rap as good as the hip-hop icon Jay-Z? Well, you can't."