The Blank is a field in a generative-AI draft that is deliberately left empty for names, dates, and amounts not found in the records, until a person checks them against the records and fills them in. It is a safeguard that stops plausible-sounding errors by the AI (hallucinations) before they go out.
What you'll learn in this chapter: Can AI drafts be used as-is? Follow the order: generate, review, finalize. Leave names, dates, and amounts not found in the records as Blanks.
Chapters 6 and 7 covered writing sentences with facts and scenes. This chapter decides where to stop when drafting those sentences with generative AI. Whenever AI is used in any chapter of this book, the order in this chapter applies.
When trying something new, how much do you hand over, and where do you stop? Here, using a familiar tool—generative AI—we consider the line between "good failures" and "bad failures," which matters so much for stretch goals. In digital marketing terms, this is making rules for content creation with AI.
Scene: A Plausible Lead Time Written by AI
An employee at a company used generative AI to draft a cover message for a quote. The writing was clean, and it looked ready to send.
It contained the sentence, "Lead time is two weeks." The employee sent it as-is.
A few days later, the client called. "We were told it would arrive in two weeks, so we already set our internal schedule around that." The actual lead time was four weeks. No one at the company had ever said two weeks.
The AI wasn't trying to lie. It had simply filled an empty field with a plausible number.
Generative AI is a tool for producing drafts quickly. People decide what goes out.
AI sometimes plausibly fills in names or amounts that aren't in the records. This is called hallucination (a plausible-sounding error). If you send it as-is, wrong numbers reach the client. Surely that is something both the client receiving the text and the top executive responsible for it want to avoid.
Moreover, what AI is best at is sentences that could be placed on any company's page. "With heartfelt care" may be one of the sentences AI finds easiest to write. The faster drafting becomes, the more you need a place to stop somewhere. If you don't stop, the new tool ends up distributing old emotional claims even more widely than before.
Today, anyone can easily create drafts without replacing major systems. Precisely because it's easy, people take charge of the decisions.
Three Rules
Rule 1: The order. Generate the draft. A person reviews it. A person finalizes it. Only after it's finalized is it published or sent. In cooking terms, you taste before you serve. Every employee follows this order in the same way. Always insert a human check at least once in the middle of the AI's work. This idea is called human-in-the-loop.
Rule 2: Blanks. Leave names, dates, and amounts not in the records as Blanks. Even if a plausible number comes to mind, leave the field empty until a person checks it against the records. When writing a deadline or a client's name, briefly note whose words, and what words, it came from. For example: "In a phone call on [month] [day], the contact said 'by the end of the month.'" A deadline that can't be annotated this way may have been guessed by the AI, so it isn't finalized. A Blank is not a failure. It is a sign that the facts from the records haven't been put in place yet.
Rule 3: Discounts and approvals are not left to the draft. Whether a discount is possible, and the name of the approver, are written by the top executive after looking at the quote version. And pages for the peak month are not created by AI (the Chapter 2 Rule).
Figure 11. From a generative-AI draft to human finalization
Four Things Treated as Errors
"I don't quite like it" and "it's wrong" are different things. The following four are treated not as matters of taste but as errors.
AQ GROW | AI Search Structure