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Hey good folks and happy Wednesday! 

I hope you are getting to settle into Q4 and fall in a cozy way, planning for time off in a couple months, and all of the holiday goodness that is coming our way. 

It’s almost soup season. Hot cider season. Warm blankets and sweats season. Q4 is stressful, but there is so much physical goodness coming our way. 

All right––today, AI, the uncanny valley, and 2026 planning.

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There is a sense of overwhelm everywhere. The AI hype is real, but so is the workslop (which HBR found requires 2 hours to fix per asset. Bye bye AI-productivity). 2026 planning is underway––and I’m thinking deeply about how to make sense of the general chaos. 

I’m sure you are, too. 

What has happened this year has been nothing short of remarkable. For me, my team has leaned in hard to AI content production in a way that feels smart and scalable. It's been hard, but impressive. We’re leading the charge on how AI can create good content, but we are also the first team to run into some of the more nuanced problems with it. 

For instance, the uncanny valley. This term was first coined by roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. It is the phenomenon where humans experience feelings of unease, revulsion, or creepiness when encountering an entity that is almost, but not quite, perfectly human-like. A team member recently called it “the land of misfit toys” but for technology. 

• Violation of expectations: When something looks nearly human but has subtle, unnatural features, our brain detects inconsistencies, leading to a sense of wrongness. 
• Cognitive dissonance: Our minds are wired to recognize and empathize with human faces, but this fails when the almost-human object doesn't possess the full range of human subtleties, creating a conflict. 
• Existential fear: The sight of a near-human entity can evoke an existential fear, such as the idea of being replaced by robots or an unsettling awareness of the boundary between human and non-human. 

My team and I venture into the uncanny valley near daily. The content we are producing with AI is good. Better than a lot of agencies of the past have been able to create––and far faster. 

It requires a rewiring of our editing brains. Editing to give feedback to AI is very different from giving feedback to humans, both technically and morally. 

Still, there is something often just slightly off about the content. This is especially true as we build long-form, top of funnel, educational content with AI. 

And keep in mind, we feed the AI an incredible amount of strategic narrative, technical documentation, case studies, sitemaps, competitive intel, persona research, consumer research, proprietary data, etc. And while technically the content is good, viscerally something about it seems amiss. 

Is this really the uncanny valley? Or, do we feel something is off about the content because we know how it was created? 

We don’t yet know, but when thinking about 2026 planning, we need to draw a line in the sand. AI is a tool. It is infrastructure. And we, the humans, get to decide how to use it. 

It is critical that marketing teams start making those decisions now. What will we use AI for, where will we use AI to assist, and what parts of our roles will purposefully not use AI at all –– and why? 

The uncanny valley poses both a professional and personal threat. It’s up to us to decide how to bring the human back into the work, and continue to consciously use AI as the tooling infrastructure it is, not the technological replacement the AI hype machine often touts.

A NOTE ON THIS ADVICE

You do you! 

One content marketer’s best practices aren’t always right for another one, though I do try to distill out the main concepts and core practices I believe everyone can benefit from. That said, you must use good judgment when deciding whether to take advice given from folks on the internet. I am an expert, and this advice comes from my direct experience, but I am not smarter than you, and I have nothing to gain or lose because of what you do.

THINGS KEEPING ME CONTENT

• What I’m watching: Toddler meltdowns, y’all. We’re officially in our era of two kids (2.5 and 1.5) in their toddler years, and these moms are struggling. The meltdowns are real, and combined with professional change and overall life in general, it feels tough. We’re taking it veerrryyy easy on our little souls, giving lots of hugs while remaining firm, and remembering that it is all just a phase. Godspeed.
• What I’m wearing: Cozy clothes. It is still in the 90s here in Austin, but inside, I’ve switched to sweats and socks and all things that feel heavy and good. All the better to face the uncanny valley and a changing world with. 
• What I’m eating: We ventured out to one of our neighborhood staples this week, Hanks. Sadly, even the rocking horses couldn’t keep our kiddos happy and it turned into a quick 20 minute meal. It’s a phase 🙂 

Thank you so much for reading. Let me know what you think by replying to this email.

Very excited to be here with y’all.

Tracey

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