THE OBVIOUS-BUT-HARD-TO-PUT-YOUR-FINGER-ON PROBLEM WITH USING AI FOR CREATIVE CONTENT
Raise your hand if you’ve seen
Home Alone: The Holiday Heist.
Spoiler alert: It super sucks. It’s the fifth movie in a series that should have stopped at two. Some bigwigs took the existing format, aggregated the scripts of the existing movies, ran some focus groups and generated something that, while technically new and different, is 90 minutes of treading mental water. There are no new thoughts. No progress.
Just mush.
That’s how AI feels. If you ask it to make something creative, it will analyze everything that already exists, edit it, “optimize” it, and repackage it into something that is technically “new” but feels like a copy of a copy of a copy. It is a crazy efficient way to get to the lowest common denominator, and as a
result, we’re now overwhelmed with endless gobs of the most tepid, unprovocative nonsense imaginable.
The real bummer is everyone seems kind of fine with it. And I get it. IRL creativity is hard. Content is a pain. But in a world crammed to the gills with AI content, human ingenuity is your only shot at standing out. That kick-ass Severance pop-up in Grand Central? Not AI-generated. Jimmy Fallon and Bad Bunny busking in the subway? Also not AI-generated. Humans engage with human ideas. We are attracted to new, interesting things. If your content is just checking the box, you’re missing the point.
To paraphrase Jeff Lebowski, some things are better off in human hands.
