I use an AI tool of some sort most days, both inside and outside of work. They're useful for brainstorming, research, testing ideas, monitoring stuff, and tackling some of the less exciting parts of content marketing.
But I've started wondering whether our increasingly habitual use of ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools might be changing how we work with actual people. Specifically, are we getting worse at briefing our human colleagues and freelancers because we’re used to typing orders into a prompt box?
I know that getting a decent creative brief has always been a challenge, so to an extent, that’s not a new problem.
A study by BetterBriefs found that while 80% of marketers thought they were good at writing briefs, only 10% of agencies agreed. So this certainly isn't a challenge AI suddenly invented... but could our growing reliance on it be making an existing problem worse?
When a prompt starts to feel like a brief
If you think about how we typically interact with AI when we want it to do something, we enter a few lines of instructions, perhaps give it some background, and expect it to figure out the rest.
If something's missing, the AI might make an assumption, fill in the gaps, or ask for clarification. If the result isn't quite right, we can simply tell it to try again.
"Shorter."
"More engaging."
"Wrong tone."
"Try a different angle."
And within seconds, we have another version. It's an incredibly convenient way to work, most of us would acknowledge. I'm curious, though, as to whether it's also changing our expectations of the creative process.
Good briefs do take a little effort
A freelance writer or designer can't necessarily turn a handful of vague instructions into exactly what a marketer has in mind. I had a conversation just the other day with a peer who told me that he was really back and forth with a client over what it was she actually wanted done. The client’s emails were short and curt, but it never used to be like this, he said.
Those of us who spend our working lives delivering work to other people need to understand the audience, the objective, the context, the brand, what's already been tried, and what success should look like.
Good freelancers will ask questions, and they might challenge an assumption or suggest an approach the client hadn't considered — but if they're constantly having to chase for basic information that should have been in the original brief, both sides lose time, deadlines can slip, and working relationships risk being damaged.
Because when we're becoming so used to AI producing something almost instantly, I wonder whether we're becoming a little less patient with that process.
Is AI changing our communication habits?
There may already be some evidence that AI is changing how we interact at work.
Research published by The Adaptavist Group in December 2025 found that 26% of workers admitted becoming less polite since using generative AI, while 32% said they were speaking to colleagues less.
Of course, that doesn't prove AI is making marketers worse at briefing people. But it raises interesting questions about the habits we're developing.
We're getting very good at giving instructions to machines that can respond instantly, endlessly and without complaint. But, are we remembering to adapt when we're working with people?
A prompt isn't always a brief
I'm certainly not suggesting we stop using AI, or that every creative brief needs to be a ten-page document. A short brief can be an excellent brief, provided it contains the right information…
And AI can actually help with that. Instead of asking it to generate the finished content, perhaps we should sometimes ask it to help us create a better brief for the human who's going to produce it.
The more accustomed we become to prompting AI, the more important it might be to remember how to brief our fellow humans.
After all, the best creative work rarely comes from someone simply doing exactly what they're told.
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