This article is an edited transcript of the provided video.
When it comes to content and ideas, generative AI tools are often touted as good brainstorming partners — but really, when you look at how these tools work, you see that actually …. they’re just full of old ideas.
Let’s break down why, and where your content and webpages come into play.
What’s the best way to tell a client you’re using AI to brainstorm on a project?
This really comes down to two things:
- Being open with the client
- Respecting the client's decisions and preferences around what AI is told about their brand.
Now, I am not a lawyer. This is just my advice as someone who works with a lot of clients, makes creative for those clients, and pokes around a lot in the world of AI governance. What I suggest is approaching your client, telling them that you use AI as part of your ideation process or part of your planning process, and then reiterate that — only if this is true — you're not using AI to produce the final product that they're getting. It's just in the preparatory phase.
At that point, you want ask them if they're comfortable with your use of AI. I mean, if you’re using content already on the client’s public website, nine times out of 10, that's already in AI training data because these tools have largely scraped the entire internet and consumed them as part of their data set. If you are sharing non-public information with the AI, that can become dicier, and you really want to get your clients sign off on that. And they may have questions about what AI tool you're using, how that AI uses your conversations for its training data. Really be clear on reading the terms and conditions around your plan and how any data you feed into the AI tool is used.
Is AI actually any good at brainstorming?
This is a really good question because AI tools are largely promoted as a great brainstorming aid. It's this idea that the AI can replace a conversation you might have with another person. You can bounce ideas off of it. It can help you come up with outlines, plans, ideas, things like that.
But AI actually isn't a good brainstorming tool. We feel like it's a good brainstorming tool because we start chatting with it and ask it for “ideas” and it gives us answers back, but there's a catch.
Because AI tools are trained on existing information from the internet, everything you get out of an AI tool is really just a remixed version of something that has existed before.
These tools can't actually come up with any completely new ideas. They may feel new to you because it's something that you personally hadn't encountered online or you personally hadn't thought of before. But when it comes down to it, everything you're getting back as a brainstorm idea is a repurposed version of something that someone has already done. If you're only using AI to brainstorm, then you're only ever getting ideas that have existed before. Whereas the human mind can come up with completely net new, novel ideas. Completely new takes on something.
Ultimately I'm of the opinion that you are severely limiting yourself if you're only ever brainstorming with AI. An AI tool is much better at looking for patterns in existing data or identifying issues such as punctuation errors in existing content than it is at giving you new “thoughts.” (It can't actually think.)
Just like with the muscles in our arms or our legs, we have to push and pull and have resistance to grow. Your brain has to have challenges to grow as well. Studies have shown that if you’re not using your brain do certain tasks that you used to — if you're using AI instead — you start to lose capabilities. Just like if you've been bodybuilding and then you stop going to the gym or you start skipping leg day, those muscles aren't going to retain their shape and their volume and their strength. The same with our creative muscle. So I highly recommend that if you've been using AI for brainstorming to start scaling back on that.
Can you see how many times an AI has used YOUR content when suggesting ideas to someone else?
Basically, if you have a website, your data has been fed into that tool. It is now part of the corpus of knowledge that makes up the so-called ideas, the remixed statements, that the AI is giving to other people.
This viewer wants to know if there's any way to figure out what the AI scraped from your site? What is it using? How closely is it reproducing that content and giving it to someone else?
There is no way, right now, to find that out.
A big issue with the AI tools, one that is now starting to move through the courts, is around copyright. AI tools are gobbling up information and repurposing it. You can assume that if you have had content on your website, it has been picked up by an AI training tool. There's usually a slight delay by anywhere from like six to 12 months. So if you had content online anywhere from the end of last year, to the middle of this year, 2025, then it's most likely in all of the AIs’ training data. And there’s no way for you to see how your creative output is being remixed and used and presented to other people as an ostensibly original output from the AI.
There are some ways to see if, broadly, your data has been in the training set, like ones made by the Atlantic and some AI SEO tools that evaluate how much of your data is picked up by an AI.
Waikay is a tool that gives you insight around how your brand has been picked up by AI search engines and chatbots
Is it possible to find out what prompts people type that lead them to your website?
Unfortunately, we can't see exactly what prompt someone has typed. That isn’t passed through to any of the tools that are currently available for end users like you or I to see.
But there's a few things you can do to get a sense for what people are typing.
Use an AI optimization tool
There's one that I've used called Otterly AI (not to be confused with Otter, the transcription tool). Otterly AI is an AI optimization tool that lets you see what kinds of prompts are associated with different keywords. You can type in a list of topics, whether these are topics you want people to be searching for, you want to be associated with, or they're actual keywords that drive traffic to your website. And Otterly will show you related prompts.
Otterly.ai is an AI tool that will show you some prompts related to your keywords
Now, you can’t say ‘oh, well, someone definitely typed that in and it definitely led to my website’, but it gives you an idea of the type of prompts people might be typing.
It’d be hard to ever pin down exactly what prompts people are typing because we can all phrase the same sentence in so many different ways.
If you have any questions related to AI, please fill out this questionnaire and I’ll answer your question in a future video! ⬇️
