How our content team uses AI to support - not replace - our writers.
I love to make things by hand and always have. Art has always been my way of processing the world, talent or lack thereof be damned, and it will always be so. Predictably, I greeted the AI era with a mix of curiosity and dread - more the latter than the former. As the leader of our writing team, the thought of machines replicating our work with twice the efficiency and half the soul was troubling at best.
And like most businesses, leadership at Monotype saw AI as an opportunity to speed up and streamline our daily work. It would have been corporate malpractice not to investigate and experiment with AI, no matter what this skeptical creative thinks. And, suspicious as I was, part of me was intrigued by the possibility of systematizing some of our most repetitive (and least fulfilling) work.
I felt it was my responsibility to own the conversation around AI content creation to ensure any solutions met our standards and, frankly, didn't scare our writers. Better to pick the tool yourself than have it chosen for you, right?
Meet Your Maker.
I developed three criteria by which we could judge potential AI tools:
It couldn't make things up. Our business is highly sensitive to factual mistakes. Remember the scene in "Hunt for Red October" where Sean Connery warns Alec Baldwin that "most things here [on his nuclear submarine] don't react well to bullets?" That's us, but with legal jargon. So the AI had to be foolproof.
It had to be on brand. Monotype is also a highly brand conscious organization. It's kind of what we do, you know. So the right AI tool had to be customizable to ensure our tone of voice didn't wander off into the forest of generic copy.
It had to do the dirty work. Content writers spend a lot of time hacking through the weeds of repetitive or iterative work. That's where we needed help. A tool that could take a single line of ad copy and rework it for 20 different placements would be a winner and free up our humans for more important, creative tasks.
This criteria guided us through an evaluation process that eliminated most open-source LLMs. We didn't want a tool that scoured the web to write articles for us. What we actually wanted was more like an Rosey from the Jetsons - a tool that would take our work and work with it, that could reformat, repurpose, translate, or edit.
We finally settled on a tool called Anyword.* Anyword is a closed-environment AI that bases its outputs entirely on your inputs, essentially making it a proprietary AI. You upload documentation on brand tone, personas, language, or any other reference materials you want, and Anyword uses them to inform the copy it generates. The fact that it only knows what you teach it checked off criteria 1 and 2 right away. We'd only have ourselves to blame if it got something wrong.
The real test, however, would be the writing team. I believe my exact words to them, prior to testing, were "Please tell me if you hate it." The team put Anyword through its paces for a month, testing every possible use case and pressure point. Could the platform take 10 articles and combine them into an ebook? Could it speak French? Did it nail our tone of voice?
Anyword passed those tests and, most importantly, the team enjoyed working with it. Sold. We had met our (AI) maker.
Anyword has been exactly what we hoped, no more and no less. It handles much of the time-consuming, non-strategic work that slowed down our team. We've been able to open up seats to other members of the company to democratize certain areas of content creation, which we can trust to be accurate and on brand because, again, we control the AI environment. The overall effect has been an easing of stress and tension - alignment between business needs and creative integrity, with no meaningful sacrifices and no jobs replaced. A win-win for all involved [knocks on wood].
Protect and Prepare.
My lesson learned is this: Resisting progress, whether you agree with it or not, is a great way to get steamrolled. I initially approached our internal AI discussions with stubbornness, but quickly saw it would get us nowhere to swim against the current. Again, it's better to control the conversation than give up your agency and, in doing so, risk an unwanted outcome. Embracing the conversation, even reluctantly, was the best way to care for our team.
My honest opinion is that AI, conceptually, has a lot of promise and is here to stay. We're doing some cool projects behind the scenes at Monotype that I think designers will love, for example.
But the conversation around it is ridiculously overheated. I fear this current moment - call it a bubble if you want - will burn out in spectacular fashion and cause a lot of collateral damage along the way. That's a post for another time. I hope I'm wrong.
Whatever happens, creative leads can't resist the progress of AI. Whatever feelings we have about it, we owe it to our teams to take the broader view and find a middle ground through all the noise. (I'm 100% talking to myself here.) Our job is to protect and prepare our teams so they can thrive alongside AI:
Protect: Your team from obsolescence, your discipline from commodification, and the very concept of human creativity from being devalued.
Prepare: Your team with new skills and an open-minded attitude; your organizational leadership, by framing AI as a tool - the means to an end, not the end itself; and the public, by reminding people that human creativity matters.
I'm sharing our team's story because, humbly, I think we've done a pretty good job of both. We found a solution that protects our brilliant writers from redundancy. They are valued for their skills as writers and thinkers, which is distinct from the tasks we use AI to complete. And yet, they have become confident and competent users of AI, which will help them in future roles as they adapt to whatever comes next. Just as importantly, company leadership sees the value in equipping creatives with innovative tools rather than replacing creatives with innovative tools.
Again, a win-win ... for now. We are still at the very beginning of this AI era, with untold advancements, meltdowns, and paradigm-shifting breakthroughs yet to come. It's our responsibility to meet each moment with measured skepticism and a commitment to the protection and preparedness of our teams and peers. Human creativity cannot be abandoned, neither through stubborn, futile resistance to change nor a wholesale sellout to some AI overlord. The middle path is there, if we're willing to claim it.
