warfeous

How to tell if AI wrote it

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There's a skill that didn't exist five years ago and is now quietly essential: recognizing AI-generated writing on sight.

Not because AI tools are always bad, or because everything they produce is worthless. But because your audience has this skill, they're developing it faster than most organizations realize, and they're using it to make judgments about credibility.

If your brand's content reads like it was generated, that's a trust problem. And the first step to solving it is being able to see what your audience sees.

What AI writing actually looks like

The patterns have shifted as the models improved. The early tells, the overuse of words like "delve" and "tapestry," the endless variations of "it is worth noting that," have faded as developers tuned them out. But the underlying fingerprints remain.

The most reliable signal is a particular kind of structural smoothness. AI-generated content flows from point to point without friction. Every paragraph connects to the next. Every claim is supported. The argument builds cleanly toward a satisfying conclusion. Nothing surprises you.

That sounds like good writing, and in many ways it is. But human writing, at its best, has texture that AI can't replicate. The sentence that sits a little uncomfortably because the writer wasn't sure how to say something difficult. The detail that's almost too specific, clearly drawn from a moment the writer actually lived. The opinion that goes a little further than the evidence strictly supports, because the writer has seen enough to feel confident about the call.

AI produces the median version of a well-structured argument. Human writing at its best is more uneven, more specific, and more alive.

The vocabulary of generated content

The word patterns shift by era and by model, but a few have proven durable.

Present participial phrases show up two to five times more often in AI writing than in human writing. "The system analyzes the data, revealing key insights." "Drawing on decades of experience, the team delivers results." Nothing wrong with these constructions on their own. They just appear at a frequency that starts to feel mechanical.

The "from X to Y" construction is another one. "From bustling cities to serene landscapes." "From startups to established enterprises." Every few paragraphs, the same template.

Sentences that begin with "This" followed by a summary of the previous point. "This approach allows organizations to..." "This shift reflects a broader trend..." The AI is confirming it tracked what it just said before moving on. Human writers do this occasionally. AI does it constantly.

And the paragraph that ends with a slightly vague but optimistic forward-looking statement. "As the landscape continues to evolve, the organizations that adapt will be positioned to thrive." It sounds like a conclusion. It doesn't actually say anything.

Why your audience notices before you do

The people reading your content developed these detection skills through exposure, not deliberate study. They can't always articulate what feels off. But they know.

A 2025 study found that people who use AI tools regularly identify AI-generated text correctly about ninety percent of the time. People who rarely use the tools do only slightly better than chance, but here's the interesting part: they still experience the content as less engaging, less trustworthy, and less worth their time.

"Hollow" is the word that keeps showing up in audience research. People feel the absence of a specific human intelligence behind the text, even when they can't explain what that absence consists of.

For brands, this matters. Content that reads as hollow isn't neutral. It actively erodes the trust you're trying to build. It tells the audience, somewhere below conscious articulation, that nobody who matters thought carefully about what they were saying to them.

The QA pass

If you're using AI tools in your content production, the most important thing you can do is build in a human review step that's specifically hunting for these patterns.

Not a proofread. Not a spell check. A deliberate pass asking: does this sound like a specific person with a real point of view, or does it sound like a well-organized average?

Three questions to ask. Is there anything here that could only have been written by someone who knows this subject from the inside? Is there a sentence that takes a genuine position, rather than presenting perspectives and letting the reader decide? Is there a detail that feels observed rather than generated?

If the answer to all three is no, it needs more human input before it goes out.

What good looks like

The goal isn't to sound unpolished. It's to sound like a specific person who knows what they're talking about.

The best AI-assisted content uses the tools for what they're good at, which is structure, drafting, and iteration, and reserves the human judgment for what matters most: the specific claims, the genuine opinions, the observed details, and the voice that holds it all together.

Your audience can't tell how you made the content. They can tell whether a human who cared about the subject was genuinely involved in making it.

That involvement is what they're looking for. Right now, it's increasingly what separates credible brand content from everything else competing for the same attention.

Investment attraction is a trust problem

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every region competing for investment has essentially the same toolkit.

Shovel-ready land. Tax incentives. Workforce development programs. Competitive operating costs. A quality of life pitch built around affordability, proximity to nature, and a growing population. These are real advantages, and every economic development organization in the country leads with them.

That's the problem. Every economic development organization in the country leads with them.

When every region offers roughly comparable incentives and roughly comparable amenities, the differentiating factor isn't the package anymore. It's the confidence an investor or site selector feels about the place. Whether it feels real. Whether they trust the people they'd be working with. Whether they can picture their business actually thriving there.

That's a trust problem. And trust isn't solved with a policy document. It's built through stories.

How site selectors actually make decisions

If you've ever talked at length with a commercial real estate broker or a corporate site selector, the thing that stands out is how much of their process is qualitative.

Yes, they run the numbers. Labour costs, logistics, utility rates, tax burden, incentive structures. The spreadsheet has to work. But the spreadsheet alone has never closed a deal. What closes deals is when the numbers work and the place feels right.

Feeling right is hard to define and easy to underestimate. It includes things like: do the local economic development staff actually seem to know the community, or are they reciting a brochure? Does the region have companies in similar industries that succeeded there, and will those companies talk about it? Is there evidence of momentum, of things being built and people showing up, rather than just potential waiting to be unlocked?

These are perception questions. And perception is shaped almost entirely by what a region chooses to put in front of people.

The credibility gap

Most economic development marketing is built on aspiration. Here's what we could be. Here's our potential. Here's the vision we're working toward.

Aspiration isn't wrong. But aspiration without evidence reads as wishful thinking. And investors, who evaluate risk for a living, are very good at sensing when a pitch is heavier on hope than on proof.

The credibility gap opens between what a region claims and what it can demonstrate. Closing it requires something economic development organizations are sometimes reluctant to do: let real people tell real stories, including the complicated ones.

A founder who moved their operation to your region and found it harder than expected, but stayed and grew, is more credible than a polished testimonial from someone with only good things to say. A company that hit regulatory challenges and worked through them with local staff is more compelling than a list of available incentives. The imperfect story, told honestly, builds more trust than the perfect pitch.

That's counterintuitive for organizations that have spent years polishing their brand. But it's consistent with how trust actually works, between people, and between people and places.

What the video brief should actually say

Investment attraction content usually gets briefed as a showcase. Show the assets, feature the amenities, present the success stories. The logic is that the more positive evidence you put in front of someone, the more confident they'll feel about the region.

But confidence doesn't come from a quantity of positive data points. It comes from a sense that what you're being shown is true.

The most effective investment attraction content I've worked on starts from a different brief: what would a skeptical, intelligent person need to see and hear to genuinely trust this place? What are their real questions, and who's best positioned to answer them credibly?

Those questions lead you away from polished showcases and toward specific, human stories. A manufacturer who can explain in plain terms why they chose this region over four alternatives. A business owner who's been operating there for fifteen years and has a considered opinion about what works and what doesn't. A worker who can describe the labour market from the inside.

These aren't glamorous stories. They don't need drone footage or a sweeping orchestral score. They need the right people, their earned trust, and something genuine captured on camera.

The compounding effect

Trust, once built, compounds. A region that consistently shows up with honest, specific, credible content builds a reputation that precedes every pitch meeting. The economic development staff walk into conversations with a tailwind instead of starting from zero.

The opposite is also true. A region that consistently leads with overpromised aspiration and generic marketing builds a reputation for that too. And that reputation is very hard to shake once a serious investor starts their own due diligence.

The regions winning at investment attraction right now aren't the ones with the best incentive packages. They're the ones that have figured out how to make serious people trust them. And that trust gets built the same way it's built between individuals: honest, specific, consistent communication over time.

A well-told true story is the most efficient investment attraction tool there is. It works while you sleep, it gets shared by the people who find it useful, and it builds the kind of credibility no press release can manufacture.

The package matters. But trust closes the deal.

Your talent attraction video shows the wrong thing

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I've watched a lot of talent attraction videos. More than most people, and probably more than is healthy.

After a while they blur together. Drone shots over a downtown core. A montage of smiling people at a farmers market. A voiceover about "vibrant communities" and "world-class amenities." Stock footage of mountains, or prairie, or coastline, depending on the region. A logo and a tagline at the end.

These videos are everywhere. They're expensive to make. And with rare exceptions, they don't work.

Not because they're poorly produced. Most are technically competent. They don't work because they're showing the wrong thing.

What the wrong thing looks like

The wrong thing is the city.

Skylines. Trails. Restaurants. Arenas. Cultural institutions. Not irrelevant, but not what moves a person to uproot their life and relocate their family either.

When someone's considering a move, they're not looking at your city. They're trying to picture themselves in it. That's a fundamentally different question, and it needs a fundamentally different answer.

A skyline shot answers: what does this place look like?

It doesn't answer: can I imagine my life here? Will my kids be okay? Will I find my people? Is this somewhere I could actually stay?

Those are the questions that drive relocation decisions. And drone footage can't answer them.

What actually moves people

A few years ago I was working on a talent attraction project for an economic development organization in southern Alberta. We spent the first few weeks doing what these projects usually do: location scouting, b-roll lists, voiceover drafts.

Then we talked to some people who'd actually moved there. Not long-time residents. Recent arrivals, within the last two or three years. People who'd made exactly the decision the video was trying to prompt.

The things they talked about had nothing to do with amenities.

One woman talked about her neighbour, who showed up with food the week she moved in and became one of her closest friends. A man talked about the hockey league he'd joined, mostly full of people who'd also moved from somewhere else, and how it became his community faster than anywhere he'd lived before. Someone else talked about the twenty-minute commute, not as a data point, but as a specific description of what it felt like to have her time back.

These weren't polished testimonials. They were specific, personal, and occasionally imperfect. And they were the most compelling talent attraction content I've ever been involved in making.

The decision someone is actually making

Talent attraction isn't a real estate transaction. It isn't a tourism campaign. It's an invitation to a life change, and it needs to be treated like one.

The decision to relocate involves a spouse or partner, often children, always a network of relationships being left behind. It involves career risk and financial uncertainty. It involves the particular anxiety of starting over somewhere unfamiliar, not knowing whether you'll find your people or spend three years feeling like an outsider.

Content that speaks to that decision has to be honest about what it's asking. It has to show the texture of daily life, not the highlight reel. It has to feature real people telling true stories about how the move actually went, including the parts that were harder than expected.

This kind of content is more vulnerable than a produced brand video. It means finding the right people, earning their trust, and knowing how to capture something real on camera. It can't be scripted in advance. It takes the discipline to stay out of the way when something genuine is happening.

But it works in a way that produced content simply doesn't. The person watching can feel the difference between a testimonial and a story. And they're making the most important life decision your video will ever be asked to support.

The brief nobody is writing

Most talent attraction briefs I receive are written around deliverables. A two-minute hero video. A thirty-second social cut. A series of lifestyle stills.

The better brief starts with a question: who's the specific person we're trying to reach, what decision are they wrestling with, and what would they need to see or hear to take the next step?

That question produces a completely different project. It pushes the work toward specificity rather than aspiration. It locates the story in real people rather than scenic geography. It asks the production to do something harder than capturing a good-looking place, which is capturing the feeling of belonging to one.

I've never met someone who moved to a new city because of a drone shot.

I've met people who moved because they watched someone they recognized tell a true story about a life they wanted.

That's the video worth making.

Wednesday nights in the darkroom

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I spend most of my professional life working fast.

Fast turnarounds. Fast edits. Fast decisions about what to keep and what to cut. My whole career is built around compressing the gap between raw material and finished story, and lately I've been building tools specifically designed to do that faster.

So it surprised me a little, a few weeks ago, to find myself standing in the darkroom at CASA on a Wednesday evening, completely still, watching an image slowly appear in a tray of developer. Waiting. Not checking my phone. Not running a mental to-do list. Just watching.

I'd signed up for the Film Photography class at CASA Lethbridge with instructor Kort W. on something between an instinct and a hunch. Wednesday nights, 7 to 9. Black and white. Manual settings, film development, darkroom printing with an enlarger. The whole process.

What I got was something I didn't know I needed: a full stop.

The camera in the bag

I'm not shooting on a borrowed camera from the class kit. I'm shooting my dad's Yashicamat 124G. A medium format twin-lens reflex that takes 120 film and produces these big, square, beautiful negatives. My dad had it for years. He passed away a few years ago, and the camera came to me along with a few other things.

I hadn't picked it up in a while. Life and work and the pace of digital production made it easy to leave it in the bag.

Coming back to it in this class has been something I didn't expect. There's a particular quality to holding a camera that someone who mattered to you also held and looked through. You frame the same square viewfinder they framed. Your hands fall into the same positions. The shutter has the same sound it always had.

It's not a sad experience. It's something quieter than that. Present, in a way that's hard to manufacture.

The thing about film

The Yashicamat gives me twelve frames per roll of 120 film. Twelve. Not three hundred. Not unlimited. Twelve chances to get it right before I have to think about what I'm doing and whether it's worth another roll.

Digital lets you take hundreds of shots in seconds. Film gives you a set number of exposures and makes you live with it. And that limitation turns out to be exactly the point. Shooting film forces you to slow down.

That's not a marketing line. It's a real cognitive shift. When each frame has a cost attached, you stop and look. Actually look. You consider the light, the composition, what you're trying to say. You make a decision and then you commit to it, because you can't take it back.

I've been a visual storyteller for more than 27 years. I know how to look at things. But I'd forgotten how to look slowly. Kort's class, and this camera, are reminding me there's a difference between scanning for usable moments and actually seeing what's in front of you.

What the darkroom does

The printmaking side of the class hit differently.

Darkroom printing is a heady mix of technical precision, creative intuition, and psychological fortitude. You're managing chemistry, light, time, and paper all at once, with no undo button and no preview. You make a test strip. Evaluate it. Adjust the exposure, adjust the contrast, try again. A finished print can take hours: exposing test strips, dodging and burning, refining the balance, reprinting until every tone feels right.

The class covers aperture and shutter speed, how to match them to the ISO of your film, film development, and making prints with an enlarger. Composition, subject matter, and contrast all get explored. But what Kort is really teaching, underneath all of that, is patience. Attention. The understanding that the process isn't separate from the result. It is the result.

None of this is efficient. It isn't supposed to be.

What it is, is present. You can't be distracted in a darkroom. The process won't allow it. And something happens to your thinking when you remove the option of distraction: the work starts to feel like it matters in a way that's hard to manufacture in front of a screen.

The hollow feeling I'd been ignoring

I want to be careful here, because I'm not anti-AI. I build AI tools for my own practice. I wrote and spoke about this publicly at the High Level Innovation Conference just last month. I believe AI can be a genuine multiplier for creative work when it handles friction rather than replacing judgment.

But I'd been noticing something in my own work that I didn't have language for until the darkroom gave it to me.

AI can create stunning visuals, but the work often feels impersonal, detached from human experience. I'd been feeling that detachment from the inside. Prompting. Generating. Selecting. Iterating. Fast. Efficient. And somehow unsatisfying in a way that was hard to pinpoint.

The research gives it a name. We value things partly by the effort that went into making them. Objects read as more valuable when substantial effort was invested in their creation, and the sheer speed of AI can make it feel like almost no effort was invested at all.

That's true for the audience looking at the work. But I think it's also true for the person making it. When the effort disappears from your own creative process, something else disappears with it. Something that feels like authorship.

The Wednesday nights helped me figure out what I'd been missing.

What slow art gives back

The constraints of analog, the limited exposures, the delayed gratification, force a more considered approach and a heightened attention to the environment and the process itself. The slow photography movement is basically an intentional counter-practice to the culture of speed, a respite from information overload and constant connectivity.

That's the academic language for what I experienced as just: relief.

Relief from the loop of generate, evaluate, discard, generate again. Relief from the distance between intention and output that AI introduces, where you describe what you want rather than make it with your hands. Relief from the particular exhaustion of creative work that moves too fast to feel like anything.

When you choose to shoot film, you're making a quiet but powerful statement: this moment matters enough to slow down, to risk mistakes, to wait.

I hadn't been saying that to myself about my work in a while.

And there's something else. When I look through the waist-level viewfinder of the Yashicamat, I'm not just slowing down. I'm holding something my dad held. I'm seeing the world through an instrument he cared about. That's not a workflow optimization. That's something much older than optimization. It's continuity. It's a conversation with someone who's no longer here, carried on in light and silver and paper.

That doesn't show up in any productivity metric. It doesn't need to.

The part that surprised me

I expected to come away from this feeling like analog and digital were opposites, and that I was choosing a side. That's not what happened.

What I came away with was a clearer sense of what each way of working is actually for. Fast, AI-assisted production has a genuine place in my workflow. It handles the mechanical parts so I can focus on the parts that need judgment. But judgment requires taste, and taste requires time spent doing slow, intentional, effortful creative work where the outcome is uncertain and the process is the point.

The darkroom is where I go to remember what I'm actually trying to do when I pick up a camera. Not produce content. Not hit a deadline. See something. Commit to it. Make it physical.

The return to analog isn't about rejecting technology. It's about wanting authenticity, presence, and something you can hold. As digital fatigue sets in and attention fragments under endless content streams, film isn't a gimmick. It's a philosophy of seeing.

That's the part I needed. Not a rejection of the tools I use professionally. A philosophy of seeing to put underneath all of them.

If you're in Lethbridge and you've ever thought about trying this, the Film Photography class at CASA is exactly what you're looking for. Kort is a thoughtful instructor and the darkroom access alone is worth it. Wednesday nights. The building smells like fixer and possibility.

And if you have a camera from someone you loved sitting in a bag somewhere, go get it. Load it. Take twelve frames.

They're still in there with you when you do.

The friction problem

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Let's be honest. You've heard both versions of the AI story by now.

Version one: AI is coming for your job, your craft, your livelihood. Hundreds of thousands of creative jobs gone by 2026. Algorithms writing scripts, generating footage, replacing the humans who used to do all of it.

Version two: AI is magic. Prompt a movie into existence. Infinite creativity at zero cost. The tech CEOs will have you believe we're weeks away from replacing every filmmaker, writer, and creative professional on the planet.

Here's the thing. Both versions are wrong.

And if you're a filmmaker, a business owner, a marketer, or anyone who creates things for a living, the truth is actually a lot more interesting than either of those stories.

The real problem isn't AI. It's the friction.

Think about the last time you recorded something. An interview. A meeting. A testimonial. A presentation.

How much of that recording was actually useful? And how long did it take you to find the parts that mattered?

That's the problem worth solving. Not whether AI can replace human creativity (it can't, and I'll get to why in a minute) but whether it can get out of the way and let you spend your time on the work that actually requires you.

For filmmakers, this friction is extreme. I'll shoot a full day of interviews, eight, ten, twelve hours of footage, and the finished piece might be eight minutes long. The gap between raw material and meaningful story is where most of the time, money, and energy disappears. And it's exhausting. Not creatively exhausting. Just tedious.

But this isn't just a filmmaker's problem. It's a podcast producer with 200 episodes they can't search. A non-profit with years of community interview footage sitting on a hard drive they've never had the budget to properly cut. A small business with forty customer testimonials they recorded and never edited. Same problem, different industry.

Why AI can't replace the soul of what you do

James Cameron, not exactly someone who shies away from technology, called AI a "disembodied mind" producing a kind of word salad that lacks the fundamental ingredient required to move an audience.

What he means is this: AI can recombine human experience. It can pattern-match, remix, and generate content that looks like the real thing. But it cannot feel. And in any creative work, whether you're making a film, pitching a client, or telling your brand's story, feeling it is the whole job.

The moment in an interview where someone's voice tightens before they say something important. The pause before the sentence that changes everything. The look on someone's face that tells you this is the take. No algorithm flags that because it matters. It flags it because the data patterns match something that mattered once before.

That's a meaningful distinction. The output might look similar. The process is completely different.

So what is AI actually good for?

Friction removal. That's it. That's the whole thing.

The best use of AI in any creative workflow is to eliminate the parts of the job that don't require you, so you can spend more time on the parts that do.

In my own work, I use an AI-assisted toolkit called Plotline to help compress the gap between raw footage and a structured first cut. It transcribes everything, identifies emotionally significant moments, finds the themes that keep coming back across multiple interviews, and hands me a starting point in my editing software. What used to take three weeks of assembly editing now takes a few days.

But here's the part that matters: nothing hits the final cut without my approval. The AI surfaces candidates. The editor decides. Every single time.

That's not a limitation of the tool. That's the whole philosophy. Because the moment you hand editorial judgment to an algorithm, you've stopped making something that feels like anything. You've started producing content. And there's already enough of that.

What this means for you, even if you never touch a camera

The principle scales beyond filmmaking.

If you run a business, you're a storyteller. Every pitch, every proposal, every piece of content you put into the world is a story about who you are and why it matters. The friction in your workflow, the hours spent on the wrong things, the gap between what you captured and what you actually needed, that's where AI can help.

Not by replacing your judgment. Not by generating your ideas. But by handling the mechanical work so your judgment and your ideas have more room to breathe.

We're in a strange moment right now where the technology is genuinely useful, the hype is genuinely overblown, and most people are stuck somewhere between panic and paralysis. Neither helps.

The smarter move is to figure out where the friction is in your work, the stuff that's tedious rather than hard, repetitive rather than creative, and let the tools handle that. Then spend the time you get back on the decisions that actually require a human.

That's not a threat to your craft. That's the point of the whole thing.

Let the machines handle the friction. You bring the soul.

The bottom line

AI isn't going to replace the people who bring soul to their work. It's going to replace the people who were only ever doing the mechanical parts.

If you make things that matter, things with a point of view, with emotional truth, with a real human behind them, you're not in danger. You're in exactly the right place.

Stop scrubbing. Start cutting.

The saturation problem

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There's a version of the AI content story that sounds like good news for marketers.

Faster production. Lower costs. Scalable output. A team of two can now produce what used to take a team of ten. The tools are genuinely impressive, and the efficiency gains are real.

But there's a version of this story nobody is telling loudly enough: when everyone has access to the same efficiency gains, the gains cancel out. What you're left with is a louder room and a shorter attention span.

The attention economy was already broken

Before generative AI, the content landscape was already oversaturated. The average person encounters somewhere between six and ten thousand brand messages a day. Feeds are engineered to maximize time on platform, which means the content competing for any given second of attention is enormous.

Against that backdrop, most branded content was already underperforming. Video completion rates were declining. Organic reach had been falling for years. The signal-to-noise ratio was already poor.

Generative AI didn't create this problem. But it's accelerating it dramatically.

What happens when content becomes free to produce

When production cost drops toward zero, the rational response for most organizations is to produce more. More posts, more videos, more variations, more channels. And in the short term, some of that volume pays off. More attempts, more chances to land something.

But volume has a ceiling. At some point, adding more content to a saturated channel produces diminishing returns, then negative ones. The audience learns to filter faster. Platform algorithms respond by restricting organic reach further. The cost of breaking through goes up even as the cost of production goes down.

The net result is a treadmill. Organizations produce more and more content to hold the same level of attention, while the price of that attention keeps rising. It's the opposite of efficiency.

Where attention is actually going

Here's what the data shows: attention isn't disappearing. It's consolidating.

Audiences are spending more time with content they've actively chosen and less with content served to them algorithmically. Long-form video is growing. Podcast listening is up. Newsletter open rates, for the newsletters that survive the cull, are higher than they've been in years. Readers are finding specific voices they trust and following them across platforms.

That doesn't describe an audience that can't pay attention. It describes an audience with better filters. They're very good at deciding, within seconds, whether something deserves their time. And they're increasingly unwilling to give it to content that feels generic, automated, or produced without genuine regard for them.

The content that's winning in this environment has one quality in common: it feels like it came from somewhere. A particular person, with a particular perspective, who made a specific decision about what to include and what to leave out. That editorial judgment is what audiences respond to, and it's exactly what automated production can't replicate.

The scarcity shift

For most of the past decade, the scarce resource in content was production capability. Good video was expensive. Good writing took time. Organizations that could produce quality at volume had a real advantage.

That scarcity is gone. Production capability is now abundant and cheap.

What's scarce now is context, perspective, and editorial judgment. The ability to look at a situation and decide what the story actually is. The willingness to take a position instead of optimizing for inoffensiveness. The specific, observed detail that makes a piece of content feel like someone was paying attention.

You can't generate those at scale. They require a human who's genuinely engaged with the subject, has developed taste over time, and is willing to make choices that reflect a real point of view.

The practical implication

If you're thinking about content strategy, the saturation problem points somewhere counterintuitive: less, better, and more specific.

One piece of content that's genuinely useful, genuinely observed, and genuinely reflective of a clear point of view will outperform ten pieces of optimised, automated content. Not because of some romantic belief in craft for its own sake, but because that's what the attention data shows.

The organizations winning the content game right now aren't the ones producing the most. They're the ones whose audiences trust them enough to seek them out. That trust gets built through consistency of voice, specificity of perspective, and content that feels like it came from a real place.

You cannot automate trust. You can only earn it.

The authenticity premium

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Something interesting is happening in the data.

At the same moment AI-generated content is flooding every platform, consumer trust in branded content is dropping. Ad fatigue is up. Engagement on polished, produced social content is declining. Meanwhile, raw, specific, clearly human storytelling is performing better than it has in years.

Those two trends aren't a coincidence. They're cause and effect.

The flood and what it's doing

Generative AI has made content cheap to produce at scale. A marketing team that once needed a writer, a designer, and a video producer can now generate a week's worth of content in an afternoon. So the volume of branded content online has exploded.

But volume without signal is just noise. And audiences, who are remarkably good at filtering noise, are getting faster at spotting AI-generated content and discounting it.

A 2026 Animoto study found consumers are significantly more likely to trust video they believe was made by a real person than content they suspect was generated or heavily automated. An EY report from the same year put authenticity in the top three factors driving consumer trust in brand communications, above production value and creative originality.

Reuters Digital Media research found audiences increasingly skeptical of content that feels optimised rather than observed. The word that kept coming up in their focus groups was "hollow."

Hollow. That's a useful word.

What hollow looks like

Hollow content is technically correct. It hits the talking points. It uses the right keywords. It has clean production and a clear call to action. But it doesn't feel like it came from a specific human who observed a specific thing and had a genuine reaction to it.

AI-generated content is hollow almost by definition. It's trained on the average of human expression, which means it reliably produces the median version of whatever you ask for. The median brand story. The median product explainer. The median emotional appeal.

The median version of anything is forgettable.

What audiences respond to instead is specificity. The detail that could only come from someone who was actually there. The sentence that doesn't quite sound like a press release because a committee didn't write it. The imperfect moment in a video that tells you the camera operator cared more about catching something real than getting a clean shot.

You can't generate those things. You can only observe them.

The premium

When something gets scarce, it gets valuable. Human-made content is becoming scarce in relative terms, even as the total volume of content keeps climbing. And scarcity, in content as in everything else, creates a premium.

You can already see it in how audiences behave. Documentary-style video, built on observed rather than constructed reality, consistently outperforms produced brand content in time-on-site and completion rates. Founder-led content, where a real person speaks from their own experience, is generating more engagement than polished brand-voice content on most platforms.

The production value arms race of the 2010s and early 2020s is over. What replaced it isn't lo-fi content for its own sake. It's content where you can feel the specific human intelligence behind it.

What this means in practice

If you're commissioning content, the calculation has shifted. The question is no longer whether you can afford high-quality production. It's whether the content has a specific, credible human perspective at its centre.

A well-produced video of a real customer talking about a real problem they solved is worth more than a polished brand anthem built on stock footage and generated voiceover. A genuine founder story, told with specificity and some willingness to be imperfect, will outlast a hundred pieces of optimised content.

That doesn't make production quality irrelevant. It makes production quality table stakes. What creates the premium is the human truth underneath it.

The brands that win the next five years of content won't be competing on volume or polish. They'll be competing on how real they're willing to be, and how well they can find the right collaborators to capture that.

That's a different brief than most marketing teams are used to writing.

But it's a much more interesting one.

The RFP process is failing creative work

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There's a particular kind of quiet that follows a rejection email.

Not the loud kind of failure, where something goes wrong on a shoot or a client changes direction mid-project. This is the low-grade, administrative kind. You spend thirty hours writing a proposal. You assemble credentials, refine your approach, price it carefully, proofread it three times. You submit it on time. And then, weeks later, a form email arrives telling you another proponent was selected.

No score. No debrief. No explanation.

I've been on the receiving end of this enough times to have developed some opinions about it. And I think the RFP process, as most institutions currently run it, is quietly making creative work worse.

The hidden cost nobody talks about

When an institution issues an RFP, the cost of responding falls entirely on the vendor. For a serious studio, a competitive proposal takes anywhere from twenty to forty hours of unbillable time. Research, writing, budgeting, formatting, printing or packaging. None of it is recoverable if you don't win.

Most institutions issuing RFPs have no idea about this arithmetic. They see a free market of options arriving in their inbox. What they don't see is that every proposal represents a real cost carried entirely by the people trying to serve them.

For large agencies with dedicated business development staff, it's manageable. For independent studios and small creative firms, it's a different calculation. When you're billing by the day and spending four days on a proposal, you're making a bet. Sometimes it pays off. Often it doesn't.

And the more competitive the field, the worse the math gets.

The pre-selected vendor problem

Here's the thing experienced vendors know but rarely say out loud: many RFPs go out with a preferred vendor already in mind.

The process exists for compliance reasons, not because the institution is genuinely undecided. The preferred vendor is often someone who's worked with the institution before, or someone a decision-maker knows personally. The RFP goes out to satisfy procurement rules, a handful of proposals come in, and the preferred vendor wins.

This isn't always deliberate cynicism. Sometimes it's unconscious. An institution finds a vendor they like, the relationship works, and when procurement requires a competitive process, they run one without really examining whether it's competitive at all.

But the effect on the vendor community is corrosive. The studios that keep responding in good faith are subsidizing a process that was never designed to serve them.

Why good studios are quietly walking away

The creative services vendor pool is shrinking. Not because there's less talent, but because experienced studios are doing the math and opting out.

If a firm responds to ten RFPs a year and wins two, they're carrying the overhead of eight failed bids. At thirty hours per proposal, that's two hundred and forty hours of unbillable time a year. For a small shop, that's a significant fraction of total capacity.

The firms that keep playing this game are often newer studios that haven't done the math yet, or larger agencies that can absorb the losses. The experienced mid-size studios, the ones with the deepest craft and the most relevant track records, are getting selective. They respond where they have a genuine relationship or a strong inside read. Everything else gets a pass.

Which means institutions that lean heavily on the RFP process are systematically filtering out the vendors most likely to do excellent work.

What better looks like

Some institutions have figured this out. They keep a pre-qualified vendor roster, updated annually, and rotate competitive solicitations among firms that have already demonstrated capability. Others run a two-stage process: a short expression of interest to establish fit, then a detailed proposal from a shortlist of three. Both approaches respect the vendor's time while still meeting procurement requirements.

The most effective relationships I've seen between institutions and creative vendors start with a conversation, not a document. A brief phone call to establish whether there's a fit. A small discovery project to test the working relationship. A pilot engagement before committing to a multi-year contract.

These approaches take more effort from the institution up front. But they consistently produce better creative outcomes and stronger long-term partnerships.

The ask

If you're an institution that regularly commissions creative work, consider what your RFP process actually signals to the vendor community.

A poorly designed process tells experienced vendors you don't value their time. It tells them the relationship is transactional before it begins. It attracts firms hungry for any work, and filters out firms with enough work to be selective.

The best creative partners are always selective. That's not arrogance. It's a sign they have standards worth meeting.

The studios and filmmakers doing the most interesting work in this province aren't refreshing their inboxes waiting for the next RFP. They're busy. They choose their projects carefully. If you want access to that calibre of work, the process needs to be worth their time.

A phone call is usually a better start than a document.

On posting less, writing more

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Spent a year posting to LinkedIn and watching the same paragraphs decay inside a feed that owes me nothing. This is the case for the canonical home.

There's a version of this writing where I keep posting essays to LinkedIn and never own the URL they live at. That version has the upside of distribution. It has the downside of being one product decision away from disappearing.[^1]

The site you are reading is the source of record. LinkedIn becomes a distribution channel for the same words. Notes from the coulee bench in Lethbridge, photo essays from the Columbia Icefields, longer pieces that need room to breathe.

I've been pretending the platform is the work. The work is the work. The platform is a way to find readers, and a fragile one.

What changed

Three things, mostly:

A note went sideways inside LinkedIn's ranking and a piece of my own writing was effectively gone within a week.
I started keeping notes for myself in a folder of MDX files, and they were better than the LinkedIn versions of the same notes.
I read four essays from craigmod.com in a row and remembered what writing for a roof feels like.

The site is the work. The platform is a way to find readers, and a fragile one.

How it ships

The stack is small on purpose. Astro on Cloudflare Workers. Markdown in, site out. No CMS, no admin, no JavaScript except where a specific feature demands it.

The other reason to build this: the rhythm of writing for my own roof is different. There's no algorithmic register to flatter, no opening hook engineered for a thumbstop. You start where the thought starts.[^2]

I expect the first six months to be slow and uneven. That's what a journal is supposed to be.

[^1]: Stream UIDs, image IDs, and frontmatter all live in the repo. Nothing about the journal is locked to a vendor I can't walk away from in an afternoon. [^2]: And finish when the thought finishes. The LinkedIn ideal length is roughly 1,400 characters. The essay ideal length is "as long as it needs to be."

Why the grain stayed

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There's a clean-image instinct that gets baked into anyone who shoots digital after 2015. Sensors get bigger, denoise gets smarter, the math wins.

The grain stays because these photographs aren't catalogue images. They're notes. A note from a 35mm frame at ISO 1600 has texture; a note from a 60-megapixel sensor with full denoise has none. I want the texture.