Welcome to Prompt, Tinker, Innovate—my AI playground. Each edition gives you a hands-on experiment that shows how AI can sharpen your thinking, cut the friction in your process, and push your creative work further.
This week's playground: the adjective audit
Marketing copy has a junk food problem.
It tastes fine on first read. Then you realize you've consumed nothing. "Innovative solutions." "Seamless experience." "Best-in-class performance." These phrases feel like they're doing work, but they aren't. They slide past the reader without landing anywhere.
The hard truth: your audience has read your exact copy—with different logos on it—at least a hundred times. When everything sounds the same, nothing gets remembered.
The fix isn't wordsmithing. It's replacement. Every vague claim needs to be swapped for something a person can actually picture:
- "Fast delivery" → "Three hours after you order, it's at your door."
- "Powerful analytics" → "You see which campaign killed your pipeline before your Monday standup."
- "Easy to use" → "Your least tech-savvy hire was running it solo by lunch on day one."
AI can do this audit in under a minute. And it's brutal.
Use case spotlight: When "innovative" is the laziest word in the room
Think about the last piece of copy you wrote or approved. How many of these showed up?
- Innovative / cutting-edge / transformational
- Seamless / frictionless
- Empowering / enabling
- Robust / scalable
- Best-in-class / industry-leading
- Fast / efficient / powerful
Every one of those phrases is an invisible commodity claim. They're what every vendor (and AI tool) says. They tell the reader how you want them to feel about your product, not what your product actually does.
The discipline of concrete, specific language is genuinely hard, especially when you're close to the thing you're describing. That's where AI earns its keep. Feed it your copy and ask it to do the work you're too close to do yourself: call out every word that costs you nothing to say.
Your AI experiment: Try this prompt
👉 Time to tinker: Find a paragraph, full page, or multi-page document of your marketing copy—website hero text, a product description, an email, a one-page case study. Paste or upload it into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, then run this prompt.
📝 Prompt:
Review this marketing copy: [paste or upload your copy here] Identify every single lazy adjective, industry buzzword, common AI word or phrase, and invisible commodity claim. Anything that sounds impressive but doesn't actually tell me anything specific. For each one you find: 1. Flag the exact word or phrase 2. Explain why it's weak (what does it actually fail to tell the reader?) 3. Replace it with concrete, visceral language or a hyper-specific metric that a [choose an audience: 12-year-old, business user, fitness guru] could instantly picture in their head Ground rules for your replacements: - No adjectives that any competitor could also claim - If the copy claims to be "fast," show me how fast without using that word - If the copy claims to be "powerful," describe what it actually does instead of labeling it - Every replacement must create a mental image or reference a number a real person could verify - Specificity beats superlatives every time Return a before/after table with your reasoning, then give me a clean rewrite of the full copy with all your replacements applied.
💡 Pro tips: run it twice—once on your copy, once on your competitor's
- Audience swap. Change the target visualizer and watch the output shift. "A 12-year-old" gets you blunt simplicity. "A skeptical CFO" gets you proof-driven language. "A first-time buyer" gets you fear-and-hesitation framing. Same copy, three completely different rewrites.
- Run it on a competitor's copy too. Paste in a rival's homepage and use the same prompt. You'll quickly see which claims you're both making—and where the real white space is.
- Make it a pre-publish ritual. Before anything goes to design, run this prompt on the draft. It takes 60 seconds and will save you from another batch of copy that sounds great in a slide but disappears in the wild.
What did you discover?
Run the prompt on something real: your homepage, a recent campaign email, a product one-pager. What got flagged that surprised you? Was there a phrase you'd been protecting that you finally had to let go?
Drop your before-and-after in the comments. The more specific, the better.
Until next time—keep tinkering, keep prompting, keep innovating.
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