╰┈➤Nº304 Do or Die but Do You Need AI? 🤖💭

Kike (pronounced *keykay)* is back this week with another newsletter intro! 📷: Quinda Verheul

“If it works, it’s obsolete” – Marshall McLuhan, 1964, p.13

And AI currently works. It saves time, resources, what the heck, even people. The best explanation I ever heard about AI was in WebSummit by the Google machine learning manager ‘machine learning means machines understanding context’, which is as simple as a machine being able to understand ‘make this blue look like the mediterranean in the early morning’, vs giving a hex code.

We’re relatively fresh off Eurobike, and both AI and authenticity have been a recurrening topic with brand managers, journalists, and industry colleagues. This felt especially fitting on the heels of my last segment in the previous newsletter. We live in a hyper alert, hyper liquid, hyper irrelevant, hyper abundant content world and we all start to acknowledge that we’re done with it.

One of the brand managers I spoke with went further and told me

"we’re becoming an AI brand, and I can’t take it anymore".

The future is built by plenty of things that currently don’t work or belong– or seem to belong. Ideas and things that don’t fit, follow a trend, or make much of a sense within the current context. By definition, things that create the future, do also change the context, so they can’t be based on contextual intelligence.

Your true voice, community, and stories that will have the power to shape the future won’t be based on a mediocre usage of contextual instructions. They will require creativity, some awkwardness, a very sharp vision, and plenty of passion. So next time you’re about to use any AI tool, maybe check this list before:

🕒 Can I take ten extra minutes and write it myself?
☕ Could I even go for a coffee or a walk and come back to try to write the idea again?
🤖 Do I want to train the machine or my brain?– creativity is also a muscle, you use it, it gets stronger
🎯 Is this message related to the core of my brand values?
🔚 If yes, give it a bigger effort: you don’t want to become an AI brand because even if this works now, you may find you'll be obsolete before you realize.
💡What inspired me lately?
👾 8/10 it wasn’t an AI-generated content
💭 Why did it inspire you?
╰┈➤ How can your brand share an inspiring message/story?

That the industry is already aware of this hazard gives me the hope that we will continue to bring things forward, to the future. We’re a bunch of weird people that somehow all love two wheels with sometimes three triangles in the middle– isn’t that weird!

thank you for reading,

Kike

p.s.

further reading: relying on AI will impede your growth & I will fucking piledriver you if you mention AI again.

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