Mind Readings: Curation is the New Creation

In today's episode, let's talk about content uh creation and curation. We're gonna start off by saying curation is the new creation. And here's what I mean. In the age of generative AI, everybody can be a creator, right? Skills are less of a barrier to entry for any creative task now, thanks to generative AI.

Now they still matter, right? Someone who's a master composer is gonna do better than a novice or you know, uh someone completely untrained like me in, say, composing a symphony, because the master composer just knows what to ask, right? Whereas someone like me, I don't even have the words, the vocabulary to articulate to a generative model. Like, hey, I want a symphony that does this, this, and this. I don't see you can see I have no words to describe the movements of a symphony or what you know, what what the drums are supposed to do.

And so mastery, master skills is still important, but generative AI certainly reduces the barrier to entry or the skills. If you don't believe me, go scroll on on the social network of your choice for five minutes and LinkedIn in particular. Count them how much AI generated content you can spot, especially imagery, right? The answer is unlikely to be zero. The question is whether that piece of content would have been a visual at all in the past, right?

Now people can just go into a generative model and make an image of you know five people sitting around a boardroom drinking coffee, giving each other high vibes, which I just saw on LinkedIn not not too long ago. Skill isn't the barrier to entry anymore. Now that you have these tools that can do it. When blogging first debuted back in the late 1990s, it was a revolution, right? Suddenly people had access to a platform that uh they could they could get their words out, right?

These were folks they could get an audience. Where previously there was absolutely no way. Before the internet, before blogging, there was no way for them to be able to do it, except in very niche cases. But when blogging first came out, when the when the web first came out in the late 90s, Bob's Uncle Bob's blog on BlogSpot might had might have had just as much reach and influence on the web during that period of time as the New York Times did. When podcasting first debuted back in the mid-2000s, 2004, 2005, suddenly a bunch of people could make and distribute quality audio that that wasn't a part of terrestrial radio.

It was an alternative to terrestrial radio. And there were a number of shows back then, including one of mine, that had huge listenership because it was just something different. It had democratized the ability to have audio distributed widely. When YouTube first debuted, you get the idea. YouTube video, all that stuff.

And each of these changes, distribution became easier, but skill was still needed. Producing high-quality content on YouTube still requires decent gear, even today. And yet, even with those limitations, the number of people producing content has exploded. There is more content on YouTube every minute of the day than there was from Hollywood in in years or decades. All that creation kind of follows a power law curve, right?

A small subset of it is excellent. Top top notch quality, a large portion of it isn't. And that's why I say curation is the new creation. The task ahead for the entertainment industry, the information industry, whatever you want to call it, and for all of us in marketing, is to recognize we are not just in the creation business anymore. We are just as much in the curation and elevation business.

There is so much good content out there buried in a sea of you know mediocrity and bad content that we can and some people will make entire careers out of simply finding the good and stuff and showcasing it. When we talk about what are the AI jobs of the future look like, what does the future look like when AI does everything? No one's gonna have any jobs. That's not true. It will take time for these new jobs to appear, but one of them is going to be curation because generative AI gives everybody the ability to create massive amounts of content.

And as things like uh the video creation tools ramp up, audio creation tools. I just saw a new one this morning called VoiceCraft that allows you to do sim uh synthetic voices really, really well. All these tools are going to make it so much easier for everybody with very very little technology needed other than a laptop and access to some compute power, you are going to see a massive explosion. We're already seeing it, but you're just gonna see even more of a massive explosion of stuff, right? So much stuff.

And so a big role will be how do you sort through all this stuff? How do you find the good stuff in all the stuff? That's gonna be a career. If you think about the movie industry or Hollywood and stuff. Right now, Hollywood is all about make the stuff, distribute the stuff.

And what Hollywood has not realized yet is that their business is going to have to pivot from make the stuff to find the stuff and maybe you know elevate it, uh, make a newer, a newer, better version of what they find. It's almost like they'll have to be talent scouts out there scouting the field. Who's making stuff that's getting lots of views on YouTube or or the channel of your choice and saying hey, let's invest in this. It's already doing well. It's already got an audience.

Let's in let's invest in that seems like a pretty safe bet. If we do it well, we can we can bring we can make it bigger, right? There was a I want to say it was um the the Tangerons that did a essentially a fan made um short for Mortal Kombat and the various studios and stuff took note and they turned into a whole series. They turned it into a a season of of uh internet television they got a good amount of money to to do that that model of going out and finding the stuff that works best and showcasing it is what Hollywood has to figure out that that's what its purpose is going to be going forward in the same way that journalism has to figure out that their job is not to break the news it's being done already their job is to validate the news to say like yeah we actually fact check this and this is actually true because yeah anyone can log on to to you know the site formerly known as Twitter and find news about anything most of it's not true so the value of a brand like the New York Times or the BBC or whatever is not being first with the news but being first with the right news with the correct news uh the factually true news. In your marketing, in your industry, how much of your role is creation and how much is curation?

How well are you known by people that are around you, that by your customers, by your prospects, by your audience for distributing the good stuff. You find and distribute the good stuff. People know when they come to you, you'll have a good answer or a good resource. That is something to think about as a value proposition for your brand. That means you don't have to be the maker.

You don't have to be the one sitting there, what am I going to put out for today's podcast? What are we going to put out for today's uh, you know, with this week's newsletter? What are we going to do for this this month's webinar? Ugh, right? The burden of having to make new stuff.

If you're a curator and you're good at it, you have an infinite supply of content now. Because all you have to do is roundups. Say, hey, these are the five articles I read this week that didn't suck. These are the five, uh, this is the two webinars this month that were worth attending. And with generative AI tools, you can come up with rubrics to analyze and process at scale and and give you that you know the short list of the stuff that you should evaluate um more closely.

The tools exist for that today. So AI gives you, gives us all the ability to make more stuff and the ability to filter through it, but there is going to be a real need for people who can curate the good stuff. And anytime there's a need, there's an opportunity to uh to earn some some uh compensation for that fulfilling that need. So give that some thought. Give that some thought for your content strategy for your marketing.

Maybe you don't need to be using generative AI to make more stuff. Maybe you can use generative AI to help you find the good stuff and then get it to your audience and become the trustworthy advisor, the trusted advisor who always has the good stuff. That's the episode for today. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you next time.

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