Culture & Code for 12 July 2025

Creativity and Artificial Intelligence

Jul 12, 2025

This is Culture & Code, a weekly newsletter and podcast about Creativity and Artificial Intelligence. Culture & Code explores innovation across storytelling, technology and audiences to help creative professionals collaborate better with AI and each other.

You Don’t Deserve an Audience

source: https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/50s-third-dimension/

Premire screening o Bwana Devil ACMI.jpg

You deserve to express your creative vision. You don’t deserve an audience who’ll care.

That takes work.

Circa 2025, creators and technologists know more about AI tools, tech stacks, production pipelines, and models down to the last pixel or token. Creators, publishers, and consultants regularly clog up LinkedIn feeds with some angle of “AI Changes Everything!” But if you look at the body of research and analysis focused on the fan experience with AI media, the implicit assumption seems to be that audiences will want what they traditionally have wanted. That’s straight up goofy.

Easy ≠ Effective

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard tech devs humble brag how they’ve automated their content creation on social media because (a) they hate marketing; and (b) AI creates content so much simpler, cheaper and fast. But if automation is easy for you, it’s easy for everyone else.

It’s straightforward to compete against other titles or products. Try competing against indifference. As a creator or a builder, your biggest challenge is no longer “how do I get my work to more people?” Going forward, the challenge is becoming “how do I create work that more people will want?”

Word of mouth, now supercharged by social media, is the most powerful growth medium for creative titles or AI tools. So you need to ask:

What assets are you giving your audience to advocate for your title or product?
How would your audience describe your work or product to a friend?
What makes your work feel personal, essential, or fun to share by your audience?

Answering these questions is why you invest in audience research and keep investing.

Be for Someone

When creators or builders say something like “working parents with school age children are my target audience,” it might sound strategic but it’s not. Suppose you are a working parent with a school age child, is there any single word in the preceding sentence suggesting the originator wants anything other than a transaction?

If you want people to care and keep caring about your work, you’ve got to care about them and show it. The better phrase is more like: “This is who I’m for. I know what they need or want. I’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen.” That’s the difference between a description and a relationship.

In practice, most every sustainable creative brand serves three layers of audience:

Primary: Never miss an episode, get every joke, buy the shirt, talk about the show
Secondary: Variable fans who show up periodically but are willing to try more
Tertiary: Casual browsers who stumbled across the show and will try it out

You build for each level. You make it easy to move to the next rung. You ensure you can make money (or at least not lose it) at every step.

That starts by knowing who you're truly building for, and making it stupid simple to communicate why it’s for them. That requires in-depth research.

Research to Ask Better Questions

Currently there’s not enough AI-specific audience data out there to draw definitive conclusions about mass market trends and preferences. In a previous career, I was a market analyst for mobile media/marketing two years before iPhone debuted and two years after. My clients were ad agencies, marketing departments and tech strategists.

At its launch in 2007, and for 2-3 years after, there were multiple predictions and assumptions about how people would use iPhone to get what they always wanted out of a mobile phone: better calling and texting, intuitive personal information management, rich media access. The economic center of gravity was assumed to be the device manufacturers, the network operators, and the software designers. Mobile marketing and e-commerce was an up and coming area. But it remained a small sub-sector up to 2010.

Then social media and 4G networks gave people new reasons to use their mobile phone. You didn’t snap a picture with a phone camera, upload it to Flickr, and ping your friends and family to access it through the site. You just snapped and posted. When it got that simple, people changed their habits. Then everything else changed, including which companies held sway over innovation and profitability.

If I look at the state of audience understanding for AI media in 2025 going into 2026, history seems to be rhyming again. We’re assuming that because we can use AI to make visual content for social media so much faster, better and cheaper, that’s the wave of the future. Who knows, it might be. But I’m betting that within the next 1-2 years, someone is going to combine AI capability with a new way for humans to interact with other humans to ignite the next evolutionary cycle.

The AI future is here but unevenly distributed to paraphrase Willam Gibson. If technology is on the move, so are audiences. Bank on it.

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C&C Show about Mental Models + Drum Machines

It’s harder to write about a short 10min solo show than an hour long interview. That’s because when I interview someone, my job is to help them present the best version of themselves for the listening audience. When it’s your own work, the job multiplies.

I spent several issues of the Culture & Code Newsletter exploring Generative AI from the idea of treating it like a Roland TR-808 Drum Machine or musical instrument rather than as a tool or an assistant or a co-pilot. I don’t think those ways of thinking about AI are wrong per se. More like they’re incomplete.

They’re incomplete because let’s remember that drum machines, synthesizers and other electronic instruments did more than change the way we made music. They developed their own musical style and audience experience that introduced more people to sounds that could be considered musical. That might sound subtle but if you look at how music and music audiences & culture co-evolved in the late 80s, 90s and 00s, what started as novelty blew up both the creative and the commercial sides of the ledger. We should expect nothing less from AI. It’s just 10min, so let me know what you think.

Listen to The 808 Effect: When AI Stops Being a Helper and Becomes a Creative Partner

AI Movie Night during Seattle Tech Week July 30

Only 15 slots left for AI Movie Night before we reach capacity! We have 135 confirmed registrations and were just mentioned as among the top ten Seattle Tech Week (July 28 - Aug 1) events.

If that doesn’t kick you to the registration page, how about a movie? Here’s a link to the 60sec spot we published earlier this week.