Why Real Content Still Matters

I'm watching a documentary about the making of Wicked and they actually built three massive sets for the Emerald City, for Munchkin Land, and for Shiz, the university. And it has me thinking a lot about the Star Wars prequel trilogy and one of the reasons it got lampooned so much is because it was all shot in front of a green screen and even if people didn't know it was green screen, there was this ineffable quality about it that made people feel it wasn't real. What made Star Wars so popular, the original trilogy, was how amazing the practical effects were. And I'm glad we have this arc from the late 1970s up until the 2000s when CGI became really popular and now 25 years later, 20 years later, we've seen a swing back into practical and movies are making a big deal about the practical effects that they're doing because they look better, they are real, and people can tell. Even if they can't word it that way, they know that it's better, it's natural, it's real. And so I'm watching this documentary, it's on Peacock, I love Peacock, and I'm watching this documentary and I can't help but feel the same way about content that is created by us versus content created by AI. Yes, it might be fine, even good, but it is ineffably unnatural. The real, raw emotion that we feel and convey when we create content cannot be replaced by a facsimile created by a computer, and we need to remember that. I saw an ad for an AI company talking about how companies, brands, won't need user-generated content anymore because their AI tool can generate it in 10 minutes. And that's bullshit. That's bullshit. Because with UGC, with real people using the thing and talking about the thing, it's way more convincing because it's real. It's not a computer the brand told to make. And so AI advocates can talk all the time, all they want, about how AI will replace people and be cheaper, but if you actually want to connect to people, just like CGI sets versus real practical sets and effects in movies, if you want to connect with the audience and you want the audience to connect with the content, it's got to be real. They have to feel it. And you can't do that with a thing generated by a computer.