SloganLenz › The Lens

Using AI for Slogans Without Sounding Like AI

July 29, 20262 min readwriting

Generated taglines have a recognisable smell. Where it comes from, how to spot it in your own shortlist, and how to use the tool without inheriting it.

There is a particular register that generated copy falls into. Balanced clauses. A colon doing structural work. Abstract nouns in the final position. It is not bad writing exactly — it is average writing, arrived at very efficiently, and average is the one thing a tagline cannot afford to be.

Knowing the tells makes them easy to filter out.

The tells

• The balanced pair. Simplicity, Redefined. Precision Meets Passion. Two abstractions bolted together with punctuation.
• The colon of significance. A short noun, a colon, then a promise. Structurally identical to a thousand other lines.
• Elevated verbs. Elevate. Unlock. Empower. Transform. All of them mean roughly make better.
• The abstract landing. Ending on excellence, innovation, possibility — words with no picture attached.
• Alliteration doing the work. When the only reason two words are adjacent is that they share a letter.

Any one of these can appear in a good line. Two or more together is almost always the register rather than the idea.

Where it comes from

A model asked for a slogan produces something in the centre of the distribution of things called slogans — which is exactly the wrong place to be. A tagline's whole job is to not be interchangeable.

So the useful move is not to ask for better slogans. It is to make the centre of the distribution somewhere more interesting, by narrowing the brief until the obvious answers stop being available.

Constrain rather than request

"Make it more creative" does very little, because creativity is not a direction. Constraints are directions. They work because they eliminate territory.

• Ban abstract nouns entirely — force every line to contain something you could photograph
• Cap it at four words
• Require a concrete object, a time of day, or a place
• Forbid the five verbs above by name
• Ask for lines a competitor would find slightly annoying

The last line is what you get without the constraint. The first three are what the constraint bought.

Use it for volume, not for judgment

The genuine advantage is throughput. Getting to thirty options used to take a day; now it takes a minute, and having thirty options is most of what makes a good choice possible.

But selection is where the value is, and selection needs someone who knows the business — which customers complain about what, which promise you can actually keep, what the last tagline got wrong. No generator has that context.

Rewrite the finalist

Take the best option and rewrite it three times by hand — shorter, more specific, more like something you would actually say out loud. The third rewrite is frequently the keeper, and it is the one nothing else could have produced, because it needed your knowledge of the business to exist.

Which is the honest summary: the machine gets you to the shortlist much faster, and the last ten percent is still yours.