The Imagination Engine
Why AI Is Only as Good as the Imagination Behind It
A Thought Leadership Publication, By Zack Kessler & Larry Goldstein
Prompts that launched a thousand generic ads.
Campaigns that feel written by everyone, and therefore, by no one.
Brands that got efficient and lost their soul.
Right now, it seems many of us in the branding and advertising world are having similar conversations about AI. And with good reason: its use grew so fast that it made unqualified people believe they were instant experts with it. Organizationally, the refrain being heard was, “AI? We got this” Then came the realization, “Actually, we don’t got it.”
Human-led, welcome back.
AI is extraordinary. But the output needs to be bounded by imagination, strategic clarity, and the vision of the person directing it.
What companies and organizations realized is that AI doesn’t raise the ceiling of your creativity. It raises the floor and makes it faster to reach your ceiling.
The Tool Doesn’t Make the Craftsman
When Sears bought the rights to the Craftsman line of tools in 1927, they understood the power of the experience they would be selling. People grabbed onto the aspiration with both hands, and craftspeople took pride in the recognition.
Before power tools existed, experts shaped everything by hand. Wood grain, tension, and joinery were understood; learned by craft. A finely built table or chair wasn’t just furniture. It was expert judgment made tangible.
When tools like the table saw, the router, and the nail gun got a hold of people’s attention, suddenly, people felt empowered to build away. Well, having these tools didn’t make the everyday person a make the master carpenter. No, these tools put novices on notice and made the great carpenters greater.
In marketing and advertising, AI is the same. Those who don’t know the tool can’t be instant craftspeople with it.
The AI Slop Phenomenon
This past year, Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year. Slop, according to lexicographers, is low-quality digital content usually produced in bulk by AI. The term rightly captures a growing frustration with the flood of questionable synthetic brand content cluttering social media feeds, search results, and platforms.
Media intelligence company Meltwater, noted that mentions of “AI slop” across the internet increased from 2024 to 2025, with negative sentiment peaking at 54%.
On LinkedIn, “AI slop” isn’t even a debate; it’s a forum for outrage and change. Turns out AI slop negatively affects SEO by raising bounce rates, which leads to lower engagement. However, the biggest issue may be that the content lacks expertise, originality, and trust. Additionally, those short‑term traffic gains don’t translate into authority or long‑term engagement.
So how should organizations address the issues at hand? By learning to master the tool.
AI is the power-tool of modern creative and marketing. The craft behind it is still entirely undeniably human.
The Imagination Gap
Currently, most organizations are using AI to produce content that’s grammatically correct, visually passable, and from a brand differentiation point of view, utterly forgettable. Volume is replacing quality and efficiency for effectiveness. Wordplay, restrained language, and unreal or generic visuals have raised the artificial bar.
Without insight, or a strong strategic point of view, or even a prompt that’s been put through a really fine filter, AI generates generic. AI has no point of view. It reflects yours. Which means if your thinking lacks imagination, your strategy is vague, or your brand definition is undefined, slop is getting reproduced at scale.
Only people can explain human and cultural experiences with resonant emotion and recall. AI doesn’t:
- Feel the emotional truth of your audience’s lived experience
- Know instinctively when a cultural moment is being exploited, not honored
- Make a genuinely brave, creative decision and stand behind it
- Build the trust, taste, and instinct that only come from years in a craft
The brands smart enough to reinvest in human creativity will likely be an advantage for the ages.
Think about the human experiences and insights behind some of the most admired brands. The freedom that roars Harley-Davidson. The radical honesty behind Dove’s Real Beauty. The irreverent edge of Liquid Death. The outside-at-all-costs DNA of REI. None of that came from a machine. They’re iconic and powerful for a reason, beyond their courageous, visionary CMO. Their brands came from people who understood something deeply human about their audience and acted on it.
Sure, AI can help you execute that faster and at a greater scale. But it cannot conjure the vision itself.
The best prompt in the world can’t replace the most authentic experiences in the room.
Working With AI vs. Working For AI
There’s a critical distinction emerging between the teams that work with AI and the teams that use it, and it may be the defining competitive divide of this decade.
When AI leads a team, the team becomes a validator of its output.
- The creative process turns reactive: prompt, review, tweak, approve, repeat.
- Strategy shrinks to fit what the machine generates.
- Human judgment gets outsourced.
These teams become dependent, lose their creative muscle, and race toward sameness. They produce more content. They don’t produce better work.
When a team works with AI, they bring their full strategic and creative intelligence to the collaboration.
- They use the tool to explore the territory they mapped themselves.
- They iterate faster because they know what they’re looking for.
- They reject most AI output because they have the taste and the standard to know the difference.
These teams are genuinely amplified. The volume they produce serves a clear, human-defined vision.
One approach is efficient. The other is effective. In branding and marketing, only one of those things builds long-term competitive advantage.
How to Embrace AI Before It Works You
The shift from passive AI user to active AI director doesn’t happen by accident. It requires deliberate choices at the individual, team, and organizational levels.
- Lead with strategy, not prompts. Do the hard human work first. Define the audience, the insight, the emotion, and the outcome. A well-crafted brief will always outperform a vague prompt. The quality of your thinking determines the quality of your output.
- Build AI into the process, not around it. Integrate AI into ideation and exploration from the start, not bolted on at the end to produce cheaper content. Teams that use AI to think, not just to execute, get fundamentally different results.
- Maintain your creative standards. The availability of AI-generated content makes it tempting to lower the bar. Resist this. Volume is not a strategy. Apply the same quality threshold to AI-assisted work as you would to anything else. Distinctive, resonant communication is still the goal.
- Protect what makes you different. Automate the repeatable. Protect the irreplaceable. Use AI to free up time for the work machines genuinely cannot do: original thinking, genuine human connection, and the conviction to back bold ideas.
Final Thought: Human-Led Will Lead The Way
Back to our carpenters and craftspeople. The best didn’t fear the power tool. They picked it up, learned it, and built things they never could have built before. When every brand has access to the same AI tools, the tools themselves stop being the differentiator. What separates the best from the rest is the imagination, taste, strategic clarity, and creative courage that shape how those tools are used.
Human creative skills are no less valuable in an AI world. They are more valuable because they cannot be commoditized.
The tool has always followed the craftsman. Not the other way around.
Written By: Zack Kessler & Larry Goldstein
Starfish is a branding and creative communications agency that ignites powerful customer connections through the discipline of brand experience.
Zack kessler
Director of Operations
Larry Goldstein
Creative Director – Copy
