Something has been occurring to me over the last 24 months, gaining more clarity the further we evolve in a world of AI, and that is the art of being human, let me explain.

The playing field has levelled

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While everyone and their aunt, grandchildren and dog, almost literally, can use AI to some degree, this has managed to get the world extremely excited. Billions of investments have been ploughed into LLM’s and other AI systems, everyone tripping over themselves to be the first to earn or grow from this new technology. The reason is simple, they have watched many other, either historic, (Industrial Revolution) to more recent (the social revolution) lead the way to the next great change and jump on quickly or, like the luddites, risk being left behind.

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Yes, this is true, people do get left behind if they don’t embrace these changes, but this time things are a little different. Something that has changed this time is that anyone can achieve incredible things with even easy prompts - amazing right? Well, kind of. The risk though that many don’t seem to be seeing, and I have been to a few talks and read as much as I can, is that these advantages are available to ANYONE, and for the moment at least, the cost is actually very low. So when you feel you are creating amazing things by the new AI results you are getting, remember this, EVERYONE is doing the same, e.g. 5 years ago you had a competitive advantage, you had a brand that you spent a lot of money on, you had a website that you had spent a lot of money on, you had a campaign that you spent a lot of money on, and you had insights that you spent a lot of money on, all only available if you had investment. Fast track 5 years and the competitive advantage you had gained through huge investment has all but evaporated, leaving someone with very little investment doing amazing things right beside you, that race you were winning and just crossing the line has seen Mr tortoise ramp up with new shiny trainers and a glint in his eye, whoosh, you're in his mirror, and he invested very little.

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Essentially what I am saying is all the large companies that had a strong competitive advantage are now competing within in a levelled playing field driven by low entry cost AI. It makes me smile and weep every time another large company tells me they are ok as they are investing in AI, they have agents doing things, they have trained their staff, they are employing AI talent. But hey, the difference is now this is available to anyone who tries, you no longer need to be an advanced developer, or pay huge fees for research or insights, you just ask AI and it will help you.

AI runs on the average, it can't originate

This levelling of the field is the first blind spot so many companies seem to be failing to see, thinking that the more they invest into AI the greater their advantages are. The second is not understanding the nature of AI, and by AI, I mean LLM’s, diffusion, reinforcement and all the systems that are being used today. Let me explain this too - LLM’s and to be honest, ALL AI works on mass data, it both stores information and searches information, and then it can weave this information together and express it in very human ways, it can even feel human and is starting to fool humans on a daily basis. It’s incredible when you think about it, except one important thing - LARGE LANGUAGE - i.e. lots of data. Now let me see if I can explain this with an analogy, think of the school playground for a moment, these LLM’s can scan a playground and it can see what everyone looks like, it can see the uniform; the shirt and ties, the trousers and skirts, the shoes, the caps, the ties, and then it can create something entirely from scratch, a new person that then stands in the playground and it looks just like everyone else, people simply can’t tell this new AI child from the rest. Except, one lad, or lass, acts in a truly human way, it doesn’t want to conform, they want to be unique, individual, cool, and so they think what it is about everyone that conforms and finds a new way of being unique, they turn their collar up. Seems simple right, their rebellion is simply to turn their collar up (you remember right? I do:), this one simple act is uniquely human, and it is what humans have always wanted, that can also be the way someone smiles, their hair, their cologne, the slang they use. It’s about being different. LLM’s can’t do this, it can feel like it can, but it can’t, it can only generalise, only humans can find things that are really human, unique, individual. This thought became as sharp as a knife recently when doing some video for a client, we needed some music for a cool brand we had been working on, we went to a very clever AI tool, and we started asking it to create some music. Wow! It was incredible, I was blown away by what it could do, totally gobsmacked, and then we started to set about making that music unique, different, and cool, and oh boy did it drive us insane. Time and time again we tried to nudge it out of what it seemed to do well, ordinary, plain, expected, it simply couldn’t create anything new, and then I tried a brand AI tool someone sent me, again, logo after logo, more and more cliched rubbish. A strange feeling came over me, ooooohhhhh…. it isn’t clever really, it is a super-fast data machine with a language tool that sounds amazing, but you know what, it can’t create, it can’t be unique, it can only ever be average, bland, more of the same. Only, one part of me felt at a loss, oh, I can't make my life easier, and then came, oh, it won't replace my job, not yet at least.

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When you can't believe what you see

Another thing to consider; a saying my father used to say to me, which his father, my grandfather said to him was, “son, believe nothing you hear and only half what you see”, if either of them were alive today they would be saying, “son, and grandson, believe nothing you hear or see”. Think this through for a moment, all your news, all you YouTube videos, anything you see from now on you will not ‘really’ believe, at the same time, all the content you do see will be more and more unoriginal slop. While all these large companies are investing more and more into augmenting and scaling there AI, to churn even more AI slop and swaths of more and more average.

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The one thing AI can't replicate: human connection

One last thing to add, I have read several reports lately on what improves longevity and over all happy lives, and you know what they have found, unequivocally through robust research, the one thing that outperforms diets, gyms, fasting, supplements, you want to know? community, human connection. There is something beautiful about being human, there is something beautiful about failure; mistakes, a need to be loved, play, to have companionship, there is a reason why we meet someone, we breakup, and we meet some else, it’s not like we fail so why bother again, we need company and human connection, and that's because we love being human, for all our flaws, so let’s be human.

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Being human is the differentiator

So, what have we got? we have a levelled playing field, where anyone can now create lots of the same stuff, and lots of large companies investing heavily in creating more of the same stuff to fill a world getting full of this rubbish, the closest thing to origination is what it can find on mass, meaning NO origination. A world being filled with more and more slop at best, a loss in trust in terms of what people see and believe, and no-one seems to be seeing the one thing that everyone craves - the uniqueness of being... HUMAN.

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So, what are my outtakes and suggestions:

Use AI to learn, provide data, augment and scale, it’s great at it, we have been using for many years and have been creating many of our own tools and agents, it’s great for that.Use humans to create, use humans for originality, AI for now is a long way from that.

Find the things in your brand that are human, start forging human connections, after all, that's what humans actually want, and need.

Remaining human in a world of AI will be the brand differentiator, and that’s coming from a human.

by Joe Hedges