I’ve been at South by Southwest the past few days, and AI is everywhere. At every panel, every happy hour, every presentation, someone recommends the best way to optimize with your new AI agent. Specifically, if you work in marketing or advertising and aren’t AI-savvy today, you’re 2 years behind. Maybe 3.
And look, they’re not entirely wrong. But the conversation doesn’t need to be so breathlessly dumb or dire.
Grace Kao, the CMO at Snap (she’s in the middle), said something during a panel that actually landed with me. She was talking about CGI and how it’s evolved dramatically over the past couple of decades, with the tools getting better, cheaper, and faster. And then she said: But without a good story, your movie is still bad.
That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire argument. You can stop reading here if you want.
But she kept going, and it was worth hearing. AI can help you scale. It can help you brainstorm. It can help you mock up and generate. But at the center of everything, there has to be a strong concept. A strong story. People appreciate craft. They also appreciate a really cool concept. And those two things are not the same as output.
Think about Moonlight. A film made for $1.5 million, with virtually no visual effects and no spectacle. Just light and silence and the weight of a person trying to exist inside a life that keeps pressing in on them. Every frame is handmade. The story does all the work, and the craft is in the restraint. The craft is in what gets left out, what gets held back, what never gets said out loud. It won Best Picture over a $20 million musical.
Now think about Mad Max: Fury Road. Wall-to-wall mayhem. Practical effects and CGI woven tightly together. That movie is a technical miracle. And it works because underneath all of it, there’s a simple story about freedom and who gets to have it. Strip away every explosion, and you’ve still got something that’s compelling.
Both of those films land. One barely touches the CGI tools. One uses every tool imaginable. The variable isn’t the technology. The variable is whether anyone involved had something to say.
Here’s what I keep thinking about, though, and it has less to do with advertising and more to do with being a person on the internet in 2026:
People, on a primal level, want to connect with other people. They want to see other people. They want to emotionally understand other people. Why they think the way they do, why they feel what they feel. That’s not a marketing insight. That’s just being alive.
I know that when I read a piece of text now, I’m scanning for it. I’m looking for the tell. Too many em dashes. That weird frictionless way of writing. The way it says a lot without actually committing to anything. I want to find the phony in the room. I want to find the AI-generated text, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think we’ve all become amateur forensic linguists, hunting for anything that feels off.
Part of what makes LLM-generated content feel weird is that it’s an aggregate. It’s trained on everything, so it sounds like a little bit of nothing. The sum of many parts, smoothed into something that’s just slightly more bland than a real person. It’s beautiful, but there are no flaws. It hasn’t lived a real life, but it’s pretending like it did. It hasn’t lost anything. It hasn’t been embarrassed. It hasn’t sat in a parking lot at 2 am, making a decision it’ll regret. And you can feel that absence.
We see it. And I love that people want to hunt it down. They want something real. They want to read something that’s dripping with actual human stakes, with the mess and the nerve and the specific, irreplaceable weirdness of a person.
AI is coming for your throat. That part’s true. The tools are real, they’re fast, and they’re going to keep getting better. But the thing the tools can’t manufacture is the reason anyone should care. The story. The specificity. The flaws that make it land.
That part’s still yours. And I think, always will be.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.
Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.
Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.
Mom, I'm scared. Can you come pick me up?
Really love this. We will always need the storytellers.