The Movie 'Her' and the Age of AI Content
Does anyone recall the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her? I’m sure it’s top of mind for a lot of people, the futuristic time it’s set in having arrived and brought versions of the AI partners it envisioned with it. The mustaches have also arrived.
In the movie, the main character, Theodore Twombly, is a man who writes letters for a living. It’s a version of a job that’s part greeting card writer and part human-powered LLM, the correspondence more personal/emotional than business writing. I think the movie wants us to believe this is sad, but it doesn’t seem that bad.
During the movie we see Theodore Twombly writing a letter and then also writing the response. This is the scene that has returned to me time and time again, especially as I think about what it means to be an effective content writer in the age of AI.
Because this is what so much email marketing, social media content, and content writing has become—robots writings for robots to read. The race to make more content to be consumed by more LLM’s and AI-assisted search engines has become a race to make more without any concern to make better.
And listen, I get that our SEO/GEO/AEO (have we settled on an acronym yet guys?) is important. I understand that we have to have measurable and attainable goals which means looking at metrics that can be quantified, but—for now—AI assisted searches and email overviews aren’t making decisions for us.
We have to remember that we’re helping humans make decisions and we need to be providing value to them, not just to the AI machine. We need to re-center the human, providing value and creating clarity to the PEOPLE who make up the companies and industries we are speaking to.
Even if Theodore was writing both sides of a conversation, we believe that the participants read the letter before hiring him. Theodore’s job wasn’t to make the reading and writing of letters obsolete, it was to help people express themselves so that they could understand each other better.
And maybe it’s a stretch to say it, but that’s what we all want, to be understood. Whether that’s in our personal lives or in our business ones. Even for tech companies, even for B2B, your product is geared at solving a problem for people and the way you talk about it should speak to them, showing that you understand their problem and how to solve it.
