The Hard Part Is Staying Human

AI feels hard today.

Granted I'm recovering from a cold and am probably not as optimistic as I usually am - but I just want to acknowledge that working on the AI front lines is hard work. Perhaps just being in a world with AI these days is hard work.

It's hard physically (AI fatigue is very real), mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

This week the Pope put out his encyclical on AI hand in hand with Anthropic founder, Christopher Olah. It feels like a momentous moment in the history of the technology but one that is getting mixed reviews in the court of public opinion. This moral and values-driven side of AI has been heating up, and it feels like it has hit a boiling point this week.

I have had many conversations about aligning my values with my AI use. Hard conversations. Hard truths that I keep busy avoiding.

The articles featured this week shine a light on much of what's hard about AI today with no light at the end of the tunnel, or AI-ism that tells you the magic solution or the one thing you need to know...none of that. Today I just want to sit with it's hard.

🔥 This Week's Hot Takes: AI Marketing Edition

Pope Leo takes aim at big tech in sweeping encyclical on AI (NPR). Pope Leo XIV put AI squarely in the moral arena, warning about inequality, democracy, and human dignity. The Chris Olah piece matters because Anthropic’s safety world and the Vatican’s moral world are now in the same room. That’s not a normal tech news cycle.

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah's remarks on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica humanitas" (Anthropic) — Chris Olah’s remarks are unusually candid for an AI lab founder. He says frontier AI companies, including Anthropic, operate under incentives that can conflict with “doing the right thing,” which is exactly why outside moral voices matter. His three big questions are labor displacement, global inequality, human flourishing, and the still-unsettled nature of AI models themselves.

Choosing to Stay Human (One Useful Thing). Ethan Mollick’s point is blunt: using AI well means choosing what to keep human, not letting the default product flow make that choice for us. The useful part for marketers is the distinction between AI that helps you think and AI that lets you stop thinking. If your brand voice is being flattened by helpful tools, this is the uncomfortable mirror.

A Pope, an AI founder and the most important document of our moment (MSN). Charles Camosy frames Magnifica Humanitas as a new Rerum Novarum for the AI era. The useful tension is that it treats AI as labor, power, dignity, and public moral infrastructure all at once, not as another software wave.

The Real AEO Playbook Lives in Content Strategy (Lisa Peyton). I tested the comforting story that citation-ready content is enough. It wasn’t. My own 10/10 Forbes piece didn’t surface in AI answers because a perfect article can still be invisible if the models can’t reach it. The play now is source-pool strategy: know which domains your category pulls from, then decide whether you need earned media, distributed mentions, or original research.

Why AI Can’t Replace The Most Important Part Of Marketing (Forbes) — AI can generate polished marketing copy in seconds, which makes real customer stories more valuable, not less. The piece uses OpenAI’s customer marketing manager role, with compensation up to $252,000, as a signal that even top AI companies still need humans who can capture lived experience, buyer risk, and trust. For B2B marketers, the takeaway is clear: the strongest content answers what the real problem was, how another customer solved it, and what changed because of it.

Stop Treating AI Visibility As One Problem. It’s Actually Three, On Three Different Layers (Search Engine Journal). Duane Forrester splits AI visibility into retrieval, knowledge graph, and context graph problems. That is useful because “write more content” only helps one layer. If your entity is fuzzy or your brand arrives badly in a customer’s internal context graph, another blog post is expensive theater.

Anthropic Is Likely Generating at Least 35% More Revenue Than OpenAI (The Information). The accessible page confirms the headline, authors, and paywall, but not the underlying reporting. I would not run this as a full takeaway without a subscriber read. The headline is still a signal: enterprise AI revenue may look very different from consumer mindshare.

Gartner: AI Is Reshaping B2B Buying, but Human Sellers Still Close the Confidence Gap (Demand Gen Report). Buyers are using GenAI and self-service channels, but 69% still prefer validating AI-generated insights with sales reps at key decision points. That’s the real B2B story: buyers want less friction until the decision feels risky. Then they want a human who can reduce uncertainty, build internal support, and make the next step feel sane.

After Automation (Every). Dan Shipper argues that automation creates more expert human work, not less, because AI makes default competence cheap and sameness abundant. The marketing translation is obvious and annoying: more drafts, more assets, more “good enough” work, and more need for human judgment to make any of it distinct. Sorry, the slop cleanup crew is us.

How to fix AI's branding problem, according to top marketers (Business Insider). Lara O’Reilly reports that top marketers see AI’s brand problem as fear, mistrust, and abstraction. The best advice is painfully basic: stop selling the moonshot, show what changes for real people, and speak to jobs, bills, data, and misinformation. Useful reminder for every AI marketer currently trapped in “future of everything” copy.

🧪 The Alchemist's Lab: Tools I've Been Testing

Waikay ("What AI Knows About You")

• Function: AI search visibility and prompt tracking. Tracks your brand's appearance in prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude. Goes deeper than mention-counting by analyzing AI responses to surface hallucinations, knowledge gaps, and competitive gaps, then converting them into actionable GEO Action Plans.

• Marketing application: This is the layer of work I was describing in my AEO blog post above. If you want to know which pool your category pulls from before you spend a dime on earned media or content investment, this is a faster way to run that audit than doing it manually across four models. It's particularly useful if you're trying to convince leadership the visibility gap is real.

• Pricing: A SoloPreneur/Small Business special at $24.95/month (limited time), Small Teams at $69.95/month, Large Teams at $199.95/month, Bigger Projects at $444/month. Free tier available to test before paying.

🎓 AI Marketing Master Class Moment

AI for Marketing: Make Your Content Citation-Worthy
https://maven.com/p/a99129/ai-for-marketing-make-your-content-citation-worthy

Free Lightning Lesson on Maven. Thursday, June 18th, 9am PT.

If you've been wondering whether your brand actually shows up when someone asks Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity a question your company should own, this is the session for you. We're going to find out together.

Here's what you'll walk out with:

A meta-prompting method for generating test queries across Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. You'll have a repeatable way to audit where your brand surfaces in AI answers and where it doesn't.

The Citation-Readiness Rubric, applied live to real examples in the session. We're not talking theory. You'll see the rubric run against actual content and know exactly what's working.

The strategic layer above the rubric. How to think about source pool inclusion, what earned media looks like when AI citation is the goal, and the difference between being cited and shaping the synthesis.

Bonus resource: Every Claude AI Concept Explained for Normal People. If your team is still trying to get clear on Projects vs Artifacts vs Skills, this is a clean primer.

📊 The Number That Made Me Spill My Green Tea

1 billion monthly active users

Google says AI Mode has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users globally. That number made me set down the green tea because conversational ads are no longer a weird search lab experiment. If ads are answer-shaped now, content strategy and paid search have to stop pretending they live in separate rooms.

🏆 My Take: What This Means for Your Marketing

The thread this week is harder: AI is forcing marketers to decide what must stay human while the machines move deeper into search, buying, and work itself. I’m not using AI as a replacement for judgment. I’m using it as a pressure test for where judgment is missing.

Action item: Pick one high-value piece of content this week and audit it against three questions: can AI retrieve it, does your brand show up as a clean entity around it, and would a buyer’s internal agent understand why it matters?

Before You Go

Hit reply and tell me: what's your biggest AI marketing challenge right now?

I read every response, and it helps shape future newsletters.

That's a wrap on this week's AI marketing alchemy. Keep experimenting, keep transforming, and remember: true magic happens when we blend AI efficiency with human creativity.

Crafted with passion and a dash of AI alchemy by Lisa Peyton
AI Practitioner, Professor, and Pioneer

Let's connect: https://linktr.ee/lisapeyton

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