Ironically, AI can help us be more human
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Issue #91: emotional ads, the democratization of design, and how not to overcommit
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In a meeting yesterday, some of us were discussing what might happen if we fed all these newsletters into an AI. (We haven’t done this! Real humans write these, which is why they’re imperfect.)
One question was met with awkward silence: If it came back with something we could (or wanted to) have written, how would we feel?
Recently, media theorist
(author of Survival of the Richest — based on a blockbuster Medium story from 2018) was working on a novel when he decided to feed an LLM a few scenes, just to see what might happen. “One scene that it wrote ended up almost exactly the same as the one I had written,” he remembers. “I went from feeling good about having finally gotten the AI to write like me, to feeling disgusted by what I had written, myself.”AI models are essentially pattern matchers. They’re designed to give you the most typical version of a thing, whether that’s a novel in the style of yourself or a portrait of a cat playing piano in the style of Keith Haring.
So, if a model trained on your work spits out something that matches what you’ve already created: Congrats! You’ve done completely average work (for you).
I’ve witnessed several writers test out collabs with AI… and get mixed results. A lot of purely AI-generated writing has ended up on this very site, but as essayist
argues, machines alone can’t produce the kind of storytelling that moves people, the kind that “make[s] you weep or gasp or call your mother.” That’s not because they literally can’t produce the sentences, but because, as Rushkoff says: “We engage with art for a sense of connection to the artist. Someone has to be home.”Maybe the best use of AI in writing is showing us what to avoid: the patterns and tropes that make our work feel… predictable. Model-able. “If a human does what the AI did,” Rushkoff says, “it means the human needs to take a break.”
What else we’re reading
- In any market, if you can’t win on price you must win on emotion. Brand strategist breaks down a new ad campaign from British Airways that’s oddly sparse (no tagline, detail, or hard sell) yet highly emotionally compelling.
- Designer attends a conference hosted by Canva (170 million active users, $1.7 billion in annual revenue). “Design is no longer a guarded skill,” he observes, as tools like Canva and Figma are creating “a shared language that empowers everyone” to make cool stuff.
- Speaking of Pablo Stanley, I’m not sure how to categorize this, and maybe it’s NSFW, but… have you seen his collection of animated butts? It’s weird. It’s wild. It’s delightful. And it’s a reminder to have fun doing whatever you’re doing.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about commitment
To make far-off commitments feel more real, ask yourself: “Would I do this tomorrow?”
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