Unlocking Creativity with AI Technology with Brooke Hill (1/3)

Eighteen months after their original conversation on the implications of AI, Stuart P Turner sits down again with Brooke Hill, founder of Wander Think (formerly The Contented Copywriter), to check in on how AI has actually played out in copywriting, content and creative thinking. Rather than the industry-wide disruption many predicted, the pair find a more nuanced picture: real progress, real limitations, and a growing need for human discernment.

Key takeaways

• AI writing tools have improved since GPT-3, but the gains are incremental rather than revolutionary. As Brooke puts it, the "junior copywriter" analogy still holds: the tools need training, guidance and a thorough editing eye to produce genuinely good work.
• Fact-checking remains a major weak point. AI tools can confidently generate statistics and sources that simply do not exist, meaning human verification is still essential before anything goes public.
• A lot of the real barrier to AI adoption in business is not the technology itself, but organisational readiness: many companies are still working out how to use AI well, and some experienced staff hold back from using it at all.
• Junior staff and interns often struggle to use AI effectively because they have not yet developed a sense of "what good looks like". Without that discernment, they cannot judge or improve on what the AI produces, which is where experienced copywriters remain essential.
• The real opportunity of AI tools is speed, not originality. They can compress time spent on research, admin and drafting, freeing people up to focus on strategic thinking, creativity and genuinely valuable content, rather than replacing the thinking itself.

Notable quotes

"It still is of the intern who thinks he should be running the company, you know?"

"Unless they know, unless they can see what good looks like and they know it and they understand it, like, how are they ever going to feel confident using it?"

"The change is there, but it's incremental. It's not a revolution."

"These tools should be allowing us the capacity to create time for creativity and curiosity, and wonder."

Summary

Revisiting their 2023 predictions, Brooke and Stuart agree that AI has not upended copywriting and content the way many feared or hoped. Tools like GPT-4 have improved on earlier versions and can produce genuinely useful output when properly briefed and trained on brand voice, but they still require significant human oversight, particularly around fact-checking and sourcing. Brooke shares a telling example of an AI tool inventing a source entirely, only admitting it did not exist after being challenged three times.

The bigger story, though, is less about the technology and more about people and process. Businesses are still figuring out how to adopt AI meaningfully, some skilled staff avoid it because they can work faster unaided, and junior team members often lack the experience to know whether AI output is any good in the first place. For Brooke and Stuart, this reinforces the enduring value of skilled copywriters and strategists: AI can speed up the mechanics of content creation, but genuine insight, critical thinking and creative judgement remain distinctly human.

Listen to the full episode above.