We’ve all been there, the family camping trip.

You’ve parked up, wind howling, rain pouring and, while everyone else huddles in the Volvo with the radio and heating on, you battle the elements and the instruction manual to get the tent up.

It’s a nightmare: poles everywhere, top sheet flapping like an inflatable waving man at a car showroom, canvas half a field away. Three minutes later, in a rupture of Millets components, you surrender and stomp back to the car.

When your family greets you with wide-eyed confusion, your only recourse is to mutter, bitterly, ‘crap tent’.

Although truthfully this has never happened to me, nor probably most of you, ‘craptent’ most certainly has. With the onset of AI and seemingly proportionate drop off in human effort and imagination, the situation is getting worse.

The state of play

Apologies, I’m ahead of myself. First, a definition: craptent is content minus thought. At its worst it’s a prompt for a 700-word blog on something nice like ‘cohesive workforces’ or ‘innovation’ or ‘inspiring leadership’.

It almost always starts with ‘In today’s modern/dynamic/fast-paced business landscape’ and pretty much always ends there, because no one EVER reads any further.

Because of this and things like it, the word ‘content’ has become self-fulfilling: it is generic, shapeless gloop that’s steadily filling up the internet and threatens to drown us all. Google doesn’t even look at it – that’s how bad it’s got.

Better, surely, to write editorial, or opinion, insight, something inspiring, investigative or full of wit that you can cut your finger on.

Dare I say, something new.

Because that’s what’s so often missing with craptent. It’s not just directionless, inane, facile and jejune, it’s always a repeat. It’s a bit of what ‘the author’ read here and there, mended, blended and extended by the generative artificial intelligence of their choice.

GenAI can’t help you out of the craptent quagmire because – while it is undoubtedly a fantastically clever leap forward (more on that in a blog coming soon) – all it can give you in this context is the neatly collected thoughts of people who went before.

The solution

The only way out of all this fraudulent copycatting is to write your own blooming content, giving it requisite time and thought. Make a cup of tea, close the door, turn off your phone, order your thoughts, consider the angles…dream a little…and perhaps – god forbid – do some research.

No, not on ChatGPT!! Haven’t you been listening?

By doing your own investigating, you’ll uncover little jewels that sparkle brighter than anything a machine could polish up. Plus, you won’t have to worry that your AI just imagined the whole thing – and that the person it quotes is not, in fact, an under-secretary at the UN but an amalgamation, or tissue of synthetic lies.

If you have time, generate your own data, or seek the views of some (other) experts. This is clearly best, because the product will be innately something new, unique and authoritative – which is a great start.

Add a dash of wisdom, a neat idea or a sprinkling of facts no one knew before and you have the basis for something, erm, what’s the word now, oh yes: interesting.

We are lucky at Man Bites Dog, because being unique and interesting is in our blueprint. When we founded 21 years ago, our CEO Claire chose our name because it describes the essence of a good story: when everyone else is writing about dogs biting people, we look (metaphorically, of course) for evidence of people biting dogs.

We’re committed to the cause. We stand for originality, inspiration, thoughtfulness and good old-fashioned effort. We love sophisticated data and the simple human stories that emanate from it – and we love to create, not generate. If there’s a moral in here somewhere, I think it’s this: GenAI has made us quick and clever (at least by proxy), but let’s not forget to make sure we’re also good.

About Dan

Dan Matthews is head of editorial at Man Bites Dog.

Talk to Dan about custom publishing, branded magazines, websites, dynamic digital and editorial products to help your business become a thought maker in its market.

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