Hey good folks and happy Thursday!

I hope you’re gearing up for a long weekend here in the US. It’s my youngest’s second birthday this week, so we have lots of time off for celebrating, and time with friends and family.

On the content/AI side of the house: Fable 5 was really good. We were hopeful about pulling it into our AI tooling to see quality increases in output. Alas, Opus 4.8 is also still very good. This Breaking Points piece on the whole thing, I thought, was very good.

Onward…

My LinkedIn feed is full of folks talking about H2 planning and what they would do if they were starting as a new director of content. Here and here, for example.

H2 does feel really exciting, both with the capabilities of AI content production systems (where humans are still very, very much in the loop), fresh interest and budget in other content forms like video and thought leadership and interactive design, and updates to the UX in LLMs like ChatGPT, which are finally sending more traffic back to sites and helping to make the case that AEO/GEO is working (impressions don’t convince leadership as much as traffic and conversion, naturally).

And the problems to solve internally are increasingly interesting, subjective, and require, as I wrote last week, deep understanding in other disciplines like philosophy. Problems like:

• What is “good” when bots are the primary audience?

• How do you create feedback loops that reduce the amount of time a human needs to be in the loop––and what does that really mean? (For quantity, for the economy, etc.)

• How good does AI really need to be to be effective? Do I need Fable 5? Or can I work with less good models to move faster, while still relying heavily on humans (this feels morally better, and may be more in line with the larger economics of AI anyway)

• How do you build human voices for exec social programs, influencer programs, and thought leadership that are void, if possible, of AI––and how can you make the case for that?

• If people are researching more and more in zero-click environments like LLMs, Google, and social media platforms, what does that mean for the modern website? How do you design it to confirm what they learned, and get them into the tool / product quickly?

• What does the above mean for top of funnel content on your site––and interactivity, and content that just “surprises and delights” in general?

The list goes on. In the YouTube clip I linked above, the guest said something along the lines of, “hallucinations are a mathematical reality with AI,” and something about that line gave me a lot of comfort. For a while, especially as AI models get more scrutinized (which they should be…), we’ll only be able to push the limits of AI content to the edge, but not exactly over it.

Human in the lead and closed-loop systems may be where a lot of this is going long-term, but I think we still have a while to get there.

From Hannah Grey VC’s newsletter. Sign up if you haven’t. They have some great thinking on AI in general.

Even when we do get there, I think there will be so much room for ingenious and creative editorial leaders who understand not just how to create content, but why to create it, how to govern it, and more.

From Hannah Grey VC’s newsletter. Sign up if you haven’t. They have some great thinking on AI in general.

I think the career paths and job functions for editors, writers, and content strategists are bright! Happy long weekend!

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 buying: So much fun stuff for my daughter’s 2nd birthday, which is TODAY. These water balloons are the real prize.

• What I’m reading: Getting really into Stoicism recently (and again!), so if you have any recs, send them over!

• What I’m eating: Picked up a sandwich from Spread & Co yesterday, but mostly enjoying the Abe’s vegan cupcakes this morning!

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