Since a majority of news stories now seem to be focused on the finances of AI, you may have heard that the math doesn’t seem to be working. As Uber’s COO Andrew Macdonald recently told Business Insider, “[It’s] very hard to draw a line between one of those [AI usage] stats and say, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful customer features.’”
Now, Macdonald wasn’t talking specifically about public-facing communications. But his message should be a wakeup call for small and medium organizations that have outsourced their strategy and production to Claude & Co.
Doing more with AI—daily LinkedIn posts! novella length blogs! do-it-all pitch decks!—simply isn’t translating into achieving more. It’s fast, yes, and relatively* easy. But it also signals to the human beings who will actually pay for your product or service that you think they have the taste of a hungry Doberman.
*Anyone who’s tried to create a coherent infographic with AI is making the Tobias Fünke face.
I Think I’d Like My Money Back
RIP Carl Weathers.
Tenor
The backlash against AI-generated content is now so strong that even LinkedIn is saying no màs. People simply aren’t interested in reading more breezy assertions that their problem isn’t X, it’s actually Y. The staccato bursts of statistics and actionable insights that were supposed to capture audiences’ attention are now largely being tuned out, even if the bulleted lists feature 🚀 and 📈 emojis.
Of course, there’s still plenty of non-AI content that sucks too! We won’t argue there’s something more noble or appealing about human-made slop. What we will suggest, though, is that subtlety and judgment still matter—at least when you’re trying to convince people of something—and that these are not qualities you’ll get consistently from tossing a prompt into Gemini or Grok.
We’re certainly a biased messenger to make this point. You’d expect an agency that delivers 100% human-created work to advocate the importance of a flesh-and-blood perspective to comms.
But having a bias or a vested interest isn’t always the same as being wrong.
Because the last word is rarely the end of the conversation.
Much like penguins, we enjoy bringing you little gifts to show we care:
You probably didn’t need to read an interview about Neanderthal dentistry today, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a little treat.
Campus Compact, a coalition of colleges and universities “committed to the public purposes of higher education” (what a concept!) is hiring a Senior Manager, Narrative & Storytelling—fully remote, $75-85k a year.
This website that explains exactly how your data is gathered when you browse the internet is the spiritual cousin of those horrifying/captivating YouTube videos about popping pimples.
Here’s what one of us is currently reading:
“At a time when the British showed no particular enthusiasm for cleanliness, Indian women for example introduced British men to the delights of regular bathing. The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the eighteenth century British of the Indian idea of cleaning hair with materials other than soap.”
Longtime readers of A Better Way to Say That may be familiar with our deep affection for all books Dalrymple. The man has never written a dud—and while White Mughals shares a setting with his other masterpieces like The Golden Road or The Anarchy, its intimate portrayal of personal relationships in colonial India makes it a unique read.
White Mughals is built around the genuine and tragic love story of Khair-un-Nissa Begum, great-niece of the powerful Nizam of Hyderabad (and a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad) and James Achilles Kirkpatrick, who served as a kind of British ambassador to the Nizam. But their romance is used to illustrate a larger, if often ignored, theme in the history of colonialism.
Chiefly: how native societies were often so appealing that it was not unusual for colonizers to adopt native diets, habits, forms of dress, languages, and religions. In the marketplace of ideas, Europeans often favored those from other cultures—a lesson that feels particularly relevant today.
