Okay team… who’s sick of hearing about AI?

I’d certainly be happy to never hear about it ever again, or at least until it cures cancer. As a person who likes to make things and believes the process is kind of, well, the whole point, the propaganda around AI is so uninspiring that it borders on terrifying, and has sent people like me burrowing further into the ground.

There are so many things we want more than AI right now — a house, maybe; an atmosphere not breaching 430 ppm; bees and glaciers and enough time in the day to feel human.

But I digress. This is a newsletter about communicating. Some months ago I wrote an edition of this newsletter about William Zinsser’s four principles of good non-fiction writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, humanity. Briefly:

I also keep coming back to Derek Thompson’s summary of Neil Postman’s arguments about television’s communication style: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In Everything is Television, Thompson maps these characteristics neatly onto the rise of algorithmic media, which he contends is converging from all sides into a river of short-form video. Let’s unpack these in contrast to Zinsser’s principles:

And yet I think television, in all its insidious permutations, is no longer our only source of confusing and uninspiring content. Today we are also dealing with, yes, those great big hulking LLMs.

Inspired by Zinsser and Postman and Thompson, I have identified four key characteristics of the universal LLM communication style (and for some reason it is universal): ambiguity, verbosity, complexity, and homogeneity. Yes, these are Zinsser’s principles flipped for the worse.

In the spirit of an overly zealous language model, I have taken it upon myself to develop a comparison table between these three styles:

Isn’t that nice?

I think it’s worth recognising the gap between the principles of good communication and the general style of what AI tends to produce. I’m not saying AI can’t be helpful in meeting one or many of Zinsser’s criteria. Sometimes it does produce a handy analogy or a simple way of thinking about or communicating something that might genuinely make your communications better.

But for the most part, AI is being used unjudiciously in the content marketing world, and the platforms are now drowning in content that is ambiguous, verbose, complex, and homogeneous. And really really dull.

Forget about the broader social consequences for now. What about the brand question?

What’s a brand supposed to do when the platforms are drowning in slop?

I am not the first to point out that every brand sounds the same now, a concept known as brand homogenisation. (Actually, this here study is a fascinating look at what happens to social media engagement with and without AI. Without AI, content volume and frequency goes down, but engagement goes up. Shocker!)

But I would argue that bland, samesies content and messaging was a problem long before AI. Weasel words had infiltrated the corporate world (and, by extension, the sustainability world) faster than a respiratory virus, and sucked all the life and oxygen out of what could have been a frontier of creativity. In attempting to stay out of legal trouble, brands use many words to say very little. Of course, this never resonates. What is safe does not stick; it is swiftly forgotten.

The bland corporate/LLM word salad aims for universal appeal, but the best writers and creators know that universal appeal comes through content that is highly specific and deeply personal.

The obvious answer here is to simply not use AI for brand comms, but the problem is now so bad that it’s likely going to take even more for brands to stand out. Readers will approach content with the assumption that it is AI-generated, meaning you’ll have to work harder to prove yourself and keep them around. I would recommend not only not using AI for brand comms, but also hiring someone incredibly creative (and giving them leeway to take risks. For startups especially, this is a no-brainer. There is absolutely nothing to lose by getting quirky and getting out there. (I’d argue the same is true for most larger companies too. Safe is dead.)

But you already know that — everyone’s talking about it. What I see fewer people talking about is this:

In the content marketing space in particular, the traditional playbook has involved a relentless focus on buyer education. Give up information, the thinking goes, in order to build trust with your buyers and become a voice of authority.

Might have worked for a while, but in the AI age I can’t see this working in the same way anymore. Information is far too easy to get, mainly from annoyingly confident LLMs who know too much. For most basic and medium-level queries, AI can actually be pretty good at laying out the facts in a way that’s clear and easy to understand. It does what your SEO content used to do.

This means any content you create in an attempt to show up in the LLMs needs to be of a depth or angle that means people actually want to click and read deeper rather than stay at the surface-level summary. But it also means your content needs to feel different.

AI might make easy, bland overviews, but what it never does is present the facts in a way that is truly interesting, inspiring, memorable, or impassioned. The only feeling one has when reading AI content is that of slowly turning to mush.

This means the content marketer’s job in the age of AI overload may no longer be to inform or educate but rather to inspire and to encourage and to entertain. To make content that promises more than a simple transactional experience of search and query. To make something beautiful; something that stays with people long after they’ve closed the tab (or left it to dwell in multi-tab purgatory).

All of this really belongs inside Zinsser’s fourth principle: humanity. This is the realm of inspiration, passion, honesty, vulnerability, magic. This is the realm of art. So permit me one final list of four — a list I think content marketers should keep in mind if they wish to gain traction in the age of machines:

What am I saying here? Am I saying that content marketing should shuffle away from ‘education’ and towards ‘art’?

Might be worth a shot. 🤷‍♀️

📹 Video: Alysa Liu rewiring your neural pathways for 4 minutes straight

Sometimes the algorithm brings you the perfect thing at the perfect time, and this short little journey into the mindset of gold-medallist/mega champion (I don’t know anything about figure skating titles) Alysa Liu found me right when I needed it.

This is someone who has decided to bring pure joy to her craft and to love the friction between her current abilities and the next step.

📚 Book: The Practicing Mind, by Thomas M. Sterner

Can’t let this section be just about videos. Closely tied to the Alysa Liu video, this book is less about the fizzy kind of ecstasy Liu clearly gets from performing and more about the quiet satisfaction anyone can get from quietly and methodically improving at their craft. A perfectly down-to-earth read for this current moment.

📹 Video: Ronny Chieng’s Harvard Address

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a watch. Even if you love AI dearly, it’s worth getting a sense for how young people are currently feeling about it, and Ronny Chieng is always intelligent and always funny. Best line: “Make sure your offline world is better than your online world.”

Since we’re on the topic of Ronny Chieng, I LOVE this clip that went crazy viral about how MAGA is right. The pacing and the language of this joke are just perfect:

It brings to mind the opening of my favourite TV show. As a non-American, it’s hilarious to me that this went as viral as it did, but I think Jeff Daniels’ delivery has a lot to do with it: