The Race to the Middle

First, an announcement: On October 22, I'm speaking at Content Marketing World in San Diego, and there are a few reasons you should join me:

1. This is the year to be at CMW, which features the smartest marketers and creators in the game. Thanks to AI, we're in the midst of massive upheaval across search and social. That's scary, but it also presents serious opportunities if you can peer around the corner to what's next.
2. San Diego in October is dope, and Issa Rae (creator of Insecure and Rap Sh!t) is headlining.
3. We can hang out! You'll love my talk on how to win in the new Storytelling Economy — a preview of my next book — and I'll be organizing dinners and happy hours there.

Register here with the promo code LAZER100 for $100 off.

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Earlier this summer, I found myself on the 60th floor of a 5-star restaurant, smack-dab in the middle of a giant CMO therapy session.

The downtown Manhattan views were breathtaking. It was like we were cosplaying an episode of Succession or Billions. I was living out my Roman Roy fantasy. Except the power struggle wasn’t with each other — it was with AI.

We went around the private dining room — graciously provided by our hosts at Pepper Content? — sharing our biggest aspirations and concerns.

Most everyone was unnerved by what changes Google’s AI Overview — and the pending SEO apocalypse — might bring.

A young, mid-market CMO hoped that AI would help his team do what he’d been begging them to: Go on Instagram and TikTok, study what’s working, and “copy the f*@%ing format — it’s not f*@%ing hard.”?

Most commonly, CMOs felt a top-down pressure to “lead the way” and use AI in all their content — from thought leadership to ads personalized at scale.

When it was my turn, I couldn’t help but pose a question that’s been bugging me for months: Why are we so eager to hand over all our content to AI when we know that doing so is a race to the middle?

The Vortex of Mid?

Frontier AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llamma are mid by design — they learn to generate text from the most common patterns in their training data, which is comprised of everything their Silicon Valley overlords could scrape off the internet —copyright be damned.?

These models are then fine-tuned through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF for those in the know) in which humans rate the AI output, often in “digital sweatshops” in Africa and Southeast Asia, and are instructed to sway the AI towards safe, inoffensive outputs.

This “midification” of AI content is why its output so often sounds like it was written by a painfully boring grad student from Connecticut named Brett.?

To give AI its due, it's a better writer than most people; I’d put the writing skills of the most advanced model today, Claude Sonnet, in the top 20% of all humans. But by nature, AI is still an averaging out of everything on the internet and thus creates a vortex that sucks you back towards the middle.?

This “midification” of AI content is why its output so often sounds like it was written by a painfully boring grad student from Connecticut named Brett.?

You can try to race ahead, but AI will suck you back into The Vortex of Mid.

With the right prompting, you might get the veneer or originality (AI is skilled at connecting ideas) and break into the upper-middle class of all content. And for many marketing leaders, that’s totally fine. Mid won’t get you fired. At least not right away.?

You can try to race ahead, but AI will suck you back into The Vortex of Mid.

In many cases, AI is even the pragmatic choice. Marketing teams have to produce a ton of commoditized content: landing pages, nurture emails, that news release announcing your fifth boring white guy CRO in the last three years. That release isn’t ending up in the MoMA, and if using AI means your exhausted one-person content team gets to reinvest that time in producing a truly original, human piece of content, the trade-off is probably worth it. Not everyone gets to be Oatly, tripping on irony and acid in every line of copy.

But that doesn't make The Vortex of Mid any less dangerous.

The hidden dangers of over-relying on AI

The issue comes when you sit down and say, “Okay, we’re going to use AI to generate all our ideas and first drafts to maximize efficiency and scale” — even if the content is supposed to be original.?

All of your content is going to be derivative. You can say, “We’re doing thought leadership!” but you’re full of sh*t. You’re just recycling other people’s ideas, probably without attribution.?

Even starting with an AI draft or outline — which many AI gurus advocate doing for thought leadership posts — is dangerous. Even if you plan to rewrite it. Writing is thinking. When writing is hard, it’s hard because you’re figuring out what you actually believe. When you outsource your first draft to AI, you anchor yourself to the AI output and eviscerate your chance to say something new and hone an original voice.

Research shows that teams that use AI for ideation see an overall drop in novelty and creativity.

This is important because AI is changing the value equation for content. Thanks to AI, the cost of producing mediocre content for top-funnel channels is plummeting, but so is its value. As search and social become increasingly overrun with bland AI-generated schlock, the quality bar will rise as consumers seek out content that doesn’t taste metallic.?

In turn, the value of high-quality content will rise, and increasingly, high-quality content will mean content that feels distinctly human.?

It’s up to us

We need to think deeply about these issues because we’re at a crossroads, and people like us — who either control content strategies and budgets or can influence those who do — will determine our direction.

As search and social become increasingly overrun with bland AI-generated schlock, the quality bar will rise as consumers seek out content that doesn’t taste metallic.?

AI could destroy the creative community and usher in a dystopian era of infinitely recycled content. Or it could bring about a creative renaissance. Both timelines are possible. In truth, it’s up to us.?

One perspective I vibed with recently came from Ted Sarandos — Netflix’s Co-CEO and Creative Chief — on the New York Times podcast “The Interview.”? Sarandos explained how he thinks about AI’s place in the creative world:

“I don’t think about AI not as a creative tool in a threatening sense, but as a creator’s tool in an enabling sense. The ways that directors, filmmakers, editors will use AI to do their jobs better — to do their jobs more efficiently and better, and in the best cases, put things on screen that would be impossible to do.”?

Sarandos believes that we need to use AI to raise the creative bar and “tell stories better than ever” and that you’re mistaken if you think AI can replace human creativity. He also believes creatives can’t ignore AI — technological progress only goes in one direction, and the train has left the station.

Sure, Sarandos might be full of crap and screw over creatives the first chance he gets, but his perspective here is the right one. If you want to stand out, build trust with your customers, and create an industry-defining brand, don’t outsource your most important content to AI and spam your audience with mediocrity at scale. Instead, use it as a “creator’s tool” to tell stories you never could otherwise.

That’s how you escape the Vortex of Mid.?That’s how you win.

3 Links

Make the Internet Fun Again (Not Boring): Loved this long-read from Packy McCormick on how slop is ruining the internet, and his wild blockchain-fueled fever dream of what might come next.

The Brat-ification of Kamala Harris (The Atlantic): Forget Taylor Swift — Charlie XCX might win Kamala the election. Elections aren't won with ads; they're won with memes, and this piece wonderfully disects this bizarre moment in culture and politics.

Kamala x Von Dutch (X): Case in point — I can't stop thinking about this video.

I'm the head of Marketing at A.Team (for a couple more weeks!) and best-selling co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Click the subscribe button above to join 145K+ marketers who read this newsletter for lessons on the art & science of storytelling in the AI Age.

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