When Everyone’s Using ChatGPT for Business
If everything out there has started feeling a little too fake and plasticky to you… here’s an idea to noodle on.
Have you been to TJ Maxx lately?
I used to love shopping there (… the marketing term "maxxinista" notwithstanding because it’s so cheesy it makes my soul briefly leave my body 😆).
I’d go by myself, with my mom, with a friend for a wander, seeing what treasures we could find. (One summer when I was working on my fear of driving I even made "drive yourself to TJ Maxx and you can buy whatever you want" a reward.)
One of my fave wear-all-summer linen dresses is from there. My big checkerboard hoop earrings that people always comment on are a TJ Maxx find. The list goes on!
But last week finally broke the spell. There wasn’t a damn thing I wanted, and I was actually kind of repulsed browsing the clothes. Everything was made of polyester, acrylic, nylon… aka plastic. Everything was some kind of shittified version of a microtrend that’s going to stop being cool in .02 seconds.
It was so fundamentally dissatisfying, touching the staticky sweaters and crunchy pants and wishing for something that felt anywhere near as good as it looked. Something, anything that got me excited to browse, buy, or wear.
That’s when it occurred to me that chatGPT & its pals are basically the new fast fashion.
(Stay with me - you know I’m not some holier than thou hater who can’t own her shit. I’m honest that I use AI tools from time to time. And I was IN the TJ Maxx in the first place, so I’m clearly not acting like I never purchase fast fashion.)
But think about it:
They're both rullllll bad for the environment.
The "If it’s cheap, someone isn’t getting paid fairly" is extremely true in both cases.
They're ripping off ("duping," "being trained on," etc) people’s IP.
They're part of the more more more faster faster lower quality instant gratification machine.
Kinda hard not to see the similarities, no?
And like… it’s weird as hell out there right now!
The groceries are expensive and the clothes are plastic and everything has this freaky AI sheen over it. Everything feels cheap, is coming apart at the seams, and doesn’t last for long.
This whole vibe is even making us question (yes, literally question what our own eyes are seeing): What’s actually real anymore? What’s worth anything?
Which brought me to this thought, as I wandered under the fluorescent lights:
Maybe all of this actually makes NOW the time to care about craftsmanship more than ever.
Maybe this is the time to finally allow yourself to be utterly FED UP WITH the plastic garments with fraying edges that are somehow more expensive and also too much for what they’re worth, that don’t fit that well and never felt great on your skin. That don’t make you feel great IN your skin.
Maybe it’s time to turn towards something made from quality materials, that’s worth the time and effort, that’s interesting in whatever way you want it to be, that you’ll love for a long time.
Maybe this increasingly plasticky time is actually the BEST time to give yourself permission to stop caring about what the tech broligarchy rewards, to stop churning out social captions and funnels and bullshit because "that’s the way business is done."
To forget fitting in and what's trending and mimicry. To forget trying to get a bot to summarize your own thoughts for you.
To treat self-expression like the art it is, to do it with craftsmanship and purpose, to do it with originality and weirdness and texture that feels true and lasting.
What if you asked yourself, "What do I DREAM of having? What would make me feel so gorgeously self-expressed and satisfied?" What would it be like to lavish care and attention on something and have the end product be so worth it, rather than accept whatever’s served up cheap and quick and held out to us on a shiny-but-flimsy platter?
… So yes, this is about copywriting, too.
What if your website, your branding, your social captions, all of it, felt so deeply and original-ly yours, like there was no doubt that it was all created by a thinking/ feeling/ artistic human’s genuine brain?
By a human being (me) for another human who has some real stuff to SAY (that’s you!) about their work and why they do it?!
This isn’t the time to try to beat the bots at their game, to join the race to the bottom.
This is one hell of a time to harness the power of being human and RISE.
So if you’re ready to take me up on that invitation…
Brand messaging + custom web copy is your one-way ticket to web words that matter. A more memorable (but completely true-to-you) message awaits.