When Words Become Cheap, Communication Becomes Valuable
Part I – A New Demand for Human Connection?
In an era dominated by AI generated content – empowering people and companies to create more content, more easily, at ever decreasing costs – I often find myself wondering whether there is any value left in human communication skills.
Can humans compete with AI?
These days it often seems like the way to get a message across is less about constructing a compelling argument, capturing the imagination or speaking to the heart, and more about capturing a large enough portion of people’s attention in a saturated attention economy.
One could always argue that good quality human messaging, when competing one v. one against AI slop – might win; but can it outcompete a whole armada of AI agents incessantly flooding the information ecosystem with their content? In that battle, the human communicator is destined to lose.
And AI has the upper hand when it comes to generating messages at scale.
Individual humans can’t compete with AI when it comes to communicating and pushing messages at scale. This is especially the case when you add the personalization capabilities of AI – today, well-funded AI systems are able to communicate quality messages that are individually tailored, at scale, in a way that has never been possible in human history.
Those who value human communication or who pride themselves on their human communication capabilities might find this current reality of AI-generated messaging taking over the attention economy as depressing.
But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that approach is wrong and that the future will actually place a premium on human communication skills.
That’s because even if everything I have said so far is true, the side of the attention economy I have been addressing so far has only been the supply side: it has become much easier to create a near-infinite supply of AI generated messaging.
What about the demand side of the attention economy?
I’m convinced that people are becoming frustrated by the bombardment of slop by marketers and corporations. Indeed, there are already signs of a distrust of AI-authored content which also creates a demand for more real, authentic, and genuinely human communication.
It seems to be that the demand is for connection that is real and not only feels real (because it is replicated by AI).
It is almost as if people living in a world full of AI generated content are feeling a yearning for real conversations – to be set free from the ‘Matrix’ of AI conversations. They hear Morpheus telling them, “what you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.”
People living in an attention ecosystem that is increasingly dominated by AI generated content, are longing for conversations in which they know there is a human behind the interaction. They are looking for conversations where they really connect with each other.
That still doesn’t change the fundamentals.
In today’s online communication ecosystem and attention economy, there is no way to outcompete powerfully-backed AI-generated content.
So even with the emerging demand, I don’t think individual humans can succeed in capturing a bigger market share of the traditional attention economy. I do think, however, that we might be able to create a completely different market.
A market operating in parallel to the flooded market for attention.
What would an alternative market for human connection look like?
Meeting the need for connection between humans, this alternative market would capture the desire for authenticity. Unlike the traditional attention economy, where the prize is attention and scale is increasingly the means of capturing it, value here would be generated through the authenticity of the interaction. The value would lie not simply in the quality of the words exchanged, but in knowing that another human being was behind them.
Most people will be used to letting their AI agents create words for them and filter situations for them (which makes sense in the traditional attention economy).
With so much of our regular communication outsourced to AI and as human reliance on AI increases – many humans will have lost the traditional ability to communicate without AI (think of the difficulty some humans have today in initiating communication, or how many of us today struggle to be separated from our phones, but on steroids).
So paradoxically, AI may increase demand for authentic human communication while simultaneously decreasing the supply of practiced human communicators. Thus, the ability to communicate well (without AI) will be a rare commodity.
Imagine a world of socially awkward people walking around with a desire to connect with each other. This marketplace will place a high premium on those with the ability to touch the heart with their words; to deliver painful news with empathy; to voice the fears and anxieties of themselves and others; to intuitively read a room of people and respond to it; to build trust across cultural boundaries; and to express emotion with sensitivity.
The paradox of the AI communication revolution may therefore be that the more communication we produce, the fewer communicators we create. And as capable human communicators become scarcer, their value will grow.
AI is giving us more words than ever before, while simultaneously reducing how often we have to find the words ourselves. The result may be a world filled with communication but starved of people who know how to communicate.
When words become cheap, the ability to communicate becomes valuable.
