Most of the business world rewards bland content, so it makes sense for people to produce it. All AI did was make that easier for more people to do more often. That's the conclusion I've reached after three years in my 'war against beige'.

In late 2022, I was telling training room after training room: don't use AI to write. Be yourself. People nodded, then used it anyway, secretly or openly, but they used it.

So I adjusted my position to 'fair enough, not everyone is a writer'. But the posts they were sharing were often still beige, interchangeable with something anyone could generate.

Forgettable isn't what writing and communicating are about.

So I shifted from 'stop using AI to write' to 'how do we beat the beige even when people are using AI?'

And honestly, a lot of people didn't like me for that. They still don't. As an author of 3 fictions novels and now my first non-fiction book, people expect me to stay up in arms about the very existence of AI, let alone people writing with it.

But my job is to help people communicate and I can't do that if I'm denying reality.

All of this led to the development of Ghostart, which acts as a ghostwriter, holding your hand as you write, asking the questions you should be answering but aren't.

Then, last year, we developed our first Beyond the Beige Summit with a line-up of experts discussing the 'beige' problem.

The findings from that summit were so fascinating, they changed our entire business model and approach. We rebuilt Ghostart from the ground up. We wrote a book based on its findings.

Because underneath the AI slop rhetoric, we see that the business world has always rewarded safe, inoffensive, forgettable content. AI didn't create the problem, it just gave it a faster photocopier.

The Beige Code, written alongside Andrew Seel, is out today in paperback, hardback and ebook. If you want to buy from Amazon, you can, or ask your local bookstore to order it in, if they aren't already stocking it.

It's a diagnosis of why the system produces forgettable content and why shaming people for using AI or telling them to 'be more human' is never going to solve it.

Order your copy of The Beige Code: https://mybook.to/thebeigecode

The Beige Code