Last week, Anthropic announced that Claude has started to embed watermarks into text it generates. The internet caught fire.
The AI debate has become so tribal we might as well think of this as Republican vs. Democrat. We are now at a point of declaring a party rather than evaluating a technology.
Why so much rage?
That’s a much deeper topic for another issue, but for starters, I think it’s because AI is touching nearly every aspect of life… and threatening those aspects of life.
Very few people care that the pictures in magazines and billboards are edited through Photoshop. Photoshop doesn’t have a daily bearing on whether our job markets are going to be threatened. It’s not existential for the majority of the population.
But when tech billionaires come out and say AI is going to eat up a huge number of jobs across nearly every white-collar sector, people see AI as a threat. Then they project the threat onto you, because you are using that technology.
If 15 years in marketing has taught me anything it’s that all of this boils down to TRUST and IMMERSION. Whatever breaks trust and immersion is what you should pay attention to.
I shared some initial thoughts here on an Instagram Reel, which you can watch here.
I have a client who runs multiple sports facilities in the Midwest. It’s a very successful business. I don’t think any of his members give two cents about whether AI is used in advertising their sports leagues.
They just want to play sports, have a good time, and drink a few beers. The craft of writing, advertising, and their uniforms, menus, and banners being designed has almost no connection to AI.
In books, film, thought leadership, and public speaking, the craft is the product.
Some publishers are stating in their contracts with writers that AI can’t be used. How enforceable is this? I don’t know. But if you’ve ever listened to a speaker that you’re pretty sure used AI to write their talk… it can suck pretty bad.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about skipping work to go see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Nolan said in an interview,
"I think AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside. It’s a transparent horse. It’s made of glass… I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime. So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it."
So, if AI use is about trust and immersion, how does that relate to your work or business? It’s all about agreements.
Trust and Immersion Measure Agreements
A few personal experiences here, so you can see two sides of the same coin (me).
For most of my life, writing has been a strength. I hated writing in school, mostly because I hated the subjects. Since growing up, I’ve come to love the craft, enjoy it, and think I’m halfway decent at it.
But my stature as a writer isn’t just about whether I’m good or not. It’s about the unspoken agreement that you and I have.
When you read my stuff in this newsletter or something that carries my name, the agreement is that I’ve thought it through, wrestled with it, tossed and turned over it, and tried to make each word count. I still write that way, and in that sense I’m a purist about it.
But this same guy, Mike Kim, has a flip side to that coin.
Last year I was in a hospital in Korea with my sister while our father was dying. Neither of us speak good Korean. We were trying to understand what the doctors, nurses, and caretakers were telling us about a really complex and serious situation. To say we were overwhelmed would be an understatement.
As soon as they started talking about bills, cancer, and burial fees, the first thing that popped into my head was whether these people were trying to rip us off. We weren’t familiar with the health care system there and understood at most 20% of what they were saying.
I decided to record all these conversations on the Voice Memo app on my iPhone. It was hours of us just nodding yes, getting them to spill the beans.
Once we got back to the hotel, I used AI to transcribe those recordings into Korean, then used ChatGPT to translate it into English.
In that instance, I couldn’t be more grateful for AI. This technology allowed us to be present with our father and with each other.
So, is AI bad? Is AI good? No, it’s about the agreement.
I don’t know what kind of business you have. I assume, because of my past work, that many who read this newsletter are in the business of thought leadership and sharing their ideas. You may even be a writer by trade.
Whether you realize it or not, your prospects, readers, audience, and clients have an agreement with you about what they’re getting from you.
- Probably 0% (not an exaggeration) of my readers would read my newsletter for very long if they knew I just used AI to crank it out.
- I also would go out on a limb here and say 0% of you, unless you’re just choosing to be a contrarian (or a jerk) would accuse me of selling out because I used AI to navigate my Dad’s situation.
Yes, Anthropic and these AI companies are going to screw a lot of people over because their own documentation isn’t going to differentiate (at least for now) whether text may have been processed by AI or authored by AI.
These are important distinctions. I’m all for AI to help you repurpose content, or process transcripts, or do grunt work.
But for now, they’re lumping all of that together. I don’t know if they’re going to try to make that right. Let’s be real: AI companies don’t care about us or the integrity of human thought or wordcraft. They did this watermarking thing to get the EU transparency rules off their back.
What’s worse: your fellow humans won’t care about nuance either because the AI argument is still so tribal. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
So What’s My Recommendation?
It’s what I said in my first book, You Are the Brand, years ago: The most effective marketing strategy is to simply tell the truth.
Keep the agreements your audience believes they have with you. If those agreements have gone unspoken, this might be a good time to talk about it.
Let me add: if you have a book coming out and never published a book in the pre-AI era, I would give that disclosure some very serious thought.
Because I wrote and published books pre-AI, I’ve earned the right to start from a baseline agreement with readers that my stuff comes from me.
I saw the writing on the wall, so for the better part of two years I was breathing down the necks of my mastermind members to write their books before all this AI stuff got out of hand.
Some took action, some didn’t. That’s their prerogative.
It’s not too late. But if AI usage affects trust, immersion in the way a client or customer experiences your brand, consider what I’m saying.
Agreements, once broken, are hard to mend.
Mike Kim
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