The power of weird

When it comes to weirdness, AI giveth and AI taketh away.

In visual formats, AI has opened up a world of the truly strange. 

Ever-evolving production tools now mean that if you can imagine something, you can create it. Social platforms have been flooded with content that was once the purview of Hollywood visual effects studios, albeit if they’d been turned over to some rather deranged teenager. 

It’s not so much a race to the bottom as a gallop to the ghoulish, with creators fighting for attention by creating the most outlandish short form video possible. 

When it comes to prose, however, AI specialises in stripping away any form of originality or strangeness. 

Ask AI to ride shotgun as you attempt to craft some unique wording, and it will reliably reply that it can do this, but not this, and in three simple ways. It can translate weirdness from imagination to reality, but it cannot create it.

At the start of the year, which was both eight weeks and a lifetime ago, the hive mind rushed to suggest that putting mistakes in copy would be this year’s anti-AI trend. This idea lasted about as long as it deserved to. But leaning into weird may end up being a key differentiator. It’d make the world a lot more fun if it did.