The AI slop machine is full steam ahead, but attention is scarcer than ever. The stuff that still moves people looks the same as it always has: fun, opinionated, and unmistakably human. To win the content game, communities, media companies, and brands must venture to the extremes of the content barbell, doubling down on either IRL or AI-generated content using data only they have on their audiences.
“Good Enough” is no longer good enough (and hasn’t been for a long time)
Generative AI has pushed the marginal cost of producing competent text, images, audio, and video to (almost) zero. When mediocre becomes ubiquitous, it also becomes valueless - just ask all of the digital-first publishers that have gone out of business. That’s why fun, opinionated, human-centered pieces are gaining value and status. If your brand voice can be mistaken for ChatGPT with a thesaurus, the algorithms will treat it accordingly.
Smart media producers are spending most of their time at the extreme ends of the content barbell:
- The Ultra-Human: live events, documentary-style video, personality-driven podcasts and other creations that broadcast unique talent, taste, or access.
- The Ultra-Personal: AI-generated content enhanced with data that only you have: newsletters that know the reader’s job title (and contain your company’s earned insights on that job title), Slackbots that surface the perfect quote from your community, or personalized videos based on your member’s interactions over their lifetime with you.
Everything in the middle, including generic blog posts and snoozefest webinars that are little more than thinly-veiled sales pitches, is getting squeezed as supply explodes. The more “human” the asset, the more defensible; the more “AI-personalised,” the more irreplaceable it feels to the individual.
IRL & Video
In-person gatherings and long-form video remain the hardest for competitors (and for AI) to replicate, so they hold premium strategic value. A conference, a dinner series, or an engaging mini-documentary blends scarcity (time, location, craft) with social proof. When budgets tighten, these assets keep audiences engaged (and, therefore, advertisers spending) because they deliver differentiated emotions and memories, not just information.
Text Is a knife fight, so execute with volume + quality
Social media algorithms, and their successors, the LLMs, reward feedback loops, not isolated masterpieces. Volume leads to more feedback, which leads to higher quality, which leads to better performance, which results in more revenue. That flywheel means the winner isn't the genius who publishes once a quarter; it’s the organization that ships, measures, iterates, and repeats daily. However, since volume is easier to produce now than ever, the volume needs to be married with quality. Easier said than done. In practical terms, there are a few things you can do to stack the deck in your favor:
- Atomize every tent-pole asset into a dozen derivatives: shorts, threads, tweets, etc. (this is another reason why IRL and video are particularly powerful - it’s easier to create high quality derivatives from them)
- Treat distribution channels (LinkedIn, TikTok, Slack, email) as laboratories
- Use a combo of data + gut feel (assuming your gut is good) to decide which angles deserve deeper investment
Three Qualities Every Hit Shares
Across genres and generations, breakout pieces share a DNA of being:
- Information-Dense: They contain a lot of information in a compact package
- Emotionally Resonant: They make you feel seen, or stir your passions
- Unusual: They take you out of the everyday
You can’t expect everything you produce to meet all three of this criteria, but if you find yourself straying too far from these qualities, you’ll likely find performance falling.
Why this matters for your business
- Sponsors want special: Multi-touch community partnerships beat single-shot event booths (or, even worse, impersonal display ads)
- LTV rises when you double down on identity: The more your content feels like your audience, the more they’ll spend
- Margin rises with repurposing: A single IRL session can spawn dozens of assets, which drives down content production costs and increases margins
Looking ahead
AI will only get better at the middle of the content barbell. If you focus on the ultra-human and the ultra-personalized, you’ll be able to create something that still deserves the attention of your audience. Ultimately, the only way to sustainably win in an environment that seems to be changing every day is to know your audience better than anybody else by collecting data and investing more in real, personal relationships at the same time.
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