My apologies to Daniel Kahneman for the riff on his title.
Maybe, like me, you’ve acquired this strange new reflex vis-a-vis AI-produced content.
I just shut down when I see the see-saw cadence. Three. Short. Sentences. Thinking that resembles candy floss.
We can all tell when someone shits on a page with unedited AI-produced product.
But, man, is it ever fast to crank out. And, with a modicum of decent human editing, it can serve a purpose. That requires a bit of codifying, however.
Welcome to the era of content fast and content slow.
Content fast
Content fast should be kept away from humans. It is for bots, who are everyone’s newest ideal customer.
As an example of content fast, get a look at this post on our blog. Humans only had a small hand in creating it, but it is consistently among the most accessed posts by the retrieval bots that put our company in AI-answers and bring us leads. I doubt any sentient person (until now) has read it. It took almost nothing to create and deploy. But it has been good to us.
Is it a hack? Maybe.
Sustainable? Probably not.
But, for now, it works.
Important to note, this kind of content performs a specific and narrow function, AI-search presence in this case.
It does not make us smarter. It is not thought leadership. And it does zero to advance how we ply our craft, because we outsourced most of the thinking to AI.
Content slow
Content slow is for humans. Not least, the human writer that produces it.
Blair Enns has said he thinks through his fingers. That’s also how I do it.
I write primarily to work through problems we encounter at Proper. Writing is how I organize and deploy thought that we then use in our work.
Sure, I like when people read my shit. But it’s not the real purpose underpinning why I write.
Content slow is cognitively involved. It takes awhile, even for the semi-prolific (of whom I believe I’m one). If bots get at it, great, but that’s not the main goal.
Done right, it ends up original and can be part of a real thought leadership regimen and genuinely impact how a business carries out its craft. Content slow often defines a firm’s point of view on what it does and how it does it. This is useful in long-cycle B2B sales.
AI can’t produce it. And while it can be used in careful ways for editing content slow, it needs to be on a short leash.
Application
This is a model (or maybe a heuristic). And, like all models, it is imperfect.
However, the art is in the application.
As a general rule, deploy content fast somewhere – probably on your owned properties – that is meant for bots. Optimize the shit out of it.
It has a place. Just know that content fast is not going to make you any smarter or better at what you do, because beyond perhaps a light edit, you outsourced the thinking.
Content slow is more painful, more deliberate and way more involved. It might not get indexed or scraped to high heaven, but it helps you grow, because writing is cognitively taxing and beneficial.
AI is shiny and enables us to do things at a ridiculous speed. As such, too many people are running thought leadership programs that are overly weighted to content fast. This approach cannot possibly work in the medium or long-term. Content fast as thought leadership is an oxymoron.
The smartest business writers write, at least in part, to sort out their own heads. That type of content slow produces original thinking, where an audience is a nice-to-have. Don’t be afraid of producing this stuff if you run a business. While reach and AI search presence are important goals, it is content slow, birthed by deep thinking, that drives innovation in a firm, reinforces positioning and solidifies differentiation.