In tech PR, we’ve reached post-enshittification.
We are now at the point where we need to ask, “Is there enough toilet paper to clean it all up?”
Here’s a cursory list of my least favourite things from across the internet and tech PR bubbles that I inhabit.
1) AI companies as Chicken Little. I admit that Dario Amodei’s histrionics about AI eating my and other jobs once scared me. But, when I started using LLMs regularly, it became eminently clear that they are total garbage for much of what I – and others who sell expertise – do.
With that, the “AI is coming for us” announcements began to look a lot like Dark-Arts-Comms plays designed to boost Share of Voice and mindshare.
While Anthropic remains the best player in the doomsday press game, we need to start calling a spade a spade: this is now just uncreative PR.
2) Calling anything a “Hot take”. My apologies to the great Stephen A. Smith, but no sentence should ever begin with “Hot Take:” It almost always implies that some sort of badly spiced pablum awaits the reader. In the age of algo, said pablum is always designed to get engagement for engagement’s sake. Follow any advice that stems from a “hot take” at your own peril.
3) “GEO spot checks.” Oddly, I have heard about this 3 times in two weeks from prospects seeking service or advice. This term is used to describe what folks claim is AI search monitoring. It means their staff go to ChatGPT and enter a prompt or brand name and see what happens. It is the equivalent of asking your mom if she thinks you have any talent.
AI search is probabilistic, meaning you can search the same terms multiple times and get different results. In aggregate, the best performing brands are only showing up around 60 percent of the time in the prompts they monitor. Buy the goddam monitoring software or pay an agency with a brain, so you get a real picture of what’s actually going on.
4) “Dead” things. I am, for now, undead. But I have been hearing of death for 25 years. When social media came, they said the 30-second spot was dead. Billboards too. PR, my chosen vocation, has been dead at least 3 times during my career. Can we stop proclaiming the media and/or entire channels dead? They have a remarkable ability to survive, it appears.
5) Investment raises as trophies. You raised money. It means you raised money. The depanneur or bodega on the corner is likely a more profitable enterprise. Indeed, a single VC investment has substantially worse odds of producing a positive return than a trip to the blackjack table. Let’s stop yelling about how great it is to give away equity to people whose bets lose the lion’s share of the time.