Key Takeaways

  • Rachel Karten surveyed roughly 100 marketers and discovered managers increasingly outsource their creative taste and gut instincts to AI chatbots.
  • Social media managers report submitting original memes only to have their bosses run them through Claude with prompts asking, "Is this funny?"
  • Employees have started mocking up their own marketing proposals inside Microsoft Copilot interfaces because their bosses only greenlight ideas that look machine-generated.
  • While enterprise tools like Asana came with months of structured workflow training at companies like Condé Nast, managers have dumped AI onto teams without operational rules or clear philosophies.

Outsourcing Taste to Claude

Rachel Karten talked to around 100 social media marketers for her newsletter and uncovered a sharp management pathology: bosses who have developed "AI brain." Instead of evaluating copy or creative ideas with their own judgment, these executives treat language models as an objective arbiter of taste.

The results are absurd. In one case, a social manager spent hours crafting an original meme for a brand campaign. When they sent the draft up the chain, their boss pasted the image and copy into Claude and asked the model: "Is this funny?"

Humor relies on subversion, timing, and hyper-specific cultural context. An LLM predicts the most probable next word based on internet training data; it averages out edge. When a manager asks an LLM to rate a joke, they reveal that they do not trust their own instincts or the people they hired. As Karten noted, the consensus reaction among frontline creatives is that the practice feels "demoralizing as hell."

The Rise of Copilot UI Theatre

When leadership values machine output over human expertise, workers adapt to the incentive structure. Karten shared an account of a marketer whose boss refused to approve concepts unless they came from an AI. To get good campaigns across the finish line, the employee began mocking up their own ideas inside the Microsoft Copilot user interface. They presented human work disguised as AI generations to secure budget and sign-off.

This is corporate theatre at its worst. The manager believes they are adopting modern automated workflows. In reality, their team is doing double the work: inventing the strategy, then reverse-engineering a fake prompt exchange so the boss feels tech-forward. It wastes hours and strips teams of creative agency.

The Missing Playbook for Marketing AI

The friction stems from how companies adopted these tools. Karten pointed back to her time working at Condé Nast, where introducing software like Asana involved months of structured onboarding, workflow design, and clear operating rules.

AI entered the workplace in reverse. Executives read headlines, bought seat licenses, and instructed staff to use generative tools immediately, without any philosophy on where human taste ends and machine drafting begins. Without explicit boundaries, managers treat AI as an infallible filter for creative risk rather than an administrative assistant.

What to Do With This

Audit your approval workflows before you mandate AI for creative tasks. If your team is running memes, hooks, or tone checks through an LLM to seek permission, stop immediately. Use AI for data synthesis or transcription, and keep creative sign-off tied to human judgment and clear brand guidelines.