Content Creation, AI, and Marx
Instead of asking why content creation—blog content or otherwise—should even be a viable marketing strategy in the age of AI, a more profound question to ask would be why in just a few years, we went from seeking expert advice and diverse forms of content to demanding only the finished product.
When I was studying sociology at the University of the Philippines, Diliman (UP), there were two thinkers that made an impact on me: Nietzsche and Marx.
Nietzsche because he said the wildest, most empowering things, and Marx because his writings made complete sense to me as a poor kid just realizing how the injustices I had been feeling were not accidental, but the result of deliberate forces that shape history.
Far from UP's classrooms, waist-deep in the day-to-day problems typical of an employee trying to make a living in the digital marketing industry, every now and then, I would still view my experiences through the lenses of these two philosophers to try to make better sense of my life.
And just now as I'm reading people's thoughts on AI platforms threatening the value of "educational blog content" as a marketing strategy, it made me consider in metaphysical terms what creates value in the first place. (I understand that's a massive leap of an analysis, but I've always found it enlightening to strip away the usual mundane perspectives on an issue and go back to philosophy, which discusses the foundations and limits of thought).
I get it. There's a temptation to make light of content creation now that information is so readily available via AI platforms. It makes you question, "Why was it not always like this? This is a lifesaver and a no-brainer. Information should have always been this easy to retrieve."
So why was—or is—information not as free as we would like?
It made me think about the value of creating information—of creating content, of knowledge. On the one hand, people do need access to more information because it equips them to make better decisions in life, which of course benefits society as a whole. But on the other hand, are they entitled to it?
Should we really have the right to access any and all information at our fingertips?
Enter Marx.
The Labor Theory of Value is an old one, and I know many economists view it as obsolete, but I think its metaphysics is as relevant today as ever.
According to Marx, “Labour is... a process between man and nature... through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.” — Capital, Vol. I
For Marx, labor is not just an economic input but the core expression of human essence. Labor is the means by which humans shape the world and themselves.
This perspective has always appealed to me because it frames people as active, productive forces shaping the world. Faced with nagging nihilism all around, it's always refreshing to look back at this viewpoint and remind myself that we're not simply passive victims of historical currents, but we're actually the ones generating and moving those waves through our labor—our work.
Work then sheds the lifeless, gray trappings we always associate with it, but shines in its ideal form: it is nothing less than our human essence expressed. Or at least, it should be.
I am human because I work.
Things become more complicated when Marx discusses value. To him, only labor creates value, and value is nothing but the amount of labor time required to produce it.
This is why it's easy pickings to modern economists critical of Marx. Obviously, the amount of time necessary to create a product is not enough to determine its value in today's context. For example, scarcity also significantly influences how much we pay for something. Eel "unagi" is so expensive to eat in Japan, not just because it takes a long time to prepare it, but also because the fish is rare and its supply heavily depends on unpredictable harvests.
But while his specific concept of value is debatable, Marx's metaphysics of labor, as an expression of human essence, and its broad relationship to value remains solid to me.
Viewed from this angle, AI scraping content and knowledge from webpages and mashing that data for users is nothing more than the willful destruction of human essence as it erases the very thing that makes labor human. It is alienation cranked up to the extreme. Now, the products of workers' labor are not merely out of their reach (in the sense that we always have to pay for commodities, including content, anyway), but AI has also turned those products—including information, knowledge, and experience—in an easily digestible mush not particularly in pursuit of any notable human-centric agenda, but for massive technology companies to out-compete each other and extract the greatest amount of profit from the very people who produce them in the first place.
This is the main problem. And it's not a digital marketing strategy one. It is an existential one.
We are only asking why information should have a face now or should have "friction" now, not because we've always felt we deserved it, but because we've been pushed into a corner to ask it.
The ease by which ChatGPT enables us to retrieve information tends to obfuscate the issue, and makes it easy to forget that knowledge is created by people going through personal experiences.
A chef makes a dish never-before-tasted after innumerable failings. A doctor gets to give medical advice because they went through countless anxieties learning their profession. An artist masters their craft through years of hardship and heartache until they can produce works of art that connect with people.
If that does not suffice to paint a picture of how value can be created, then consider also that people need to pay to have these learning opportunities, thus, a formal education for many professions.
AI obliterates that chain of value by skipping to the end product. It is a meal without a chef. A diagnosis without a doctor. A painting without a painter.
It is content without a creator.
We may not realize it, but what we want is not merely faceless or frictionless information. In a hyper-competitive world continuously trying to reduce us to perform like cogs in a machine, what we truly seek is a human stamp in the products we use and consume.
We want perspective.
We want expertise.
We want creativity from a life touched by the same pressures as ours.
I wish the repercussions of AI stopped at the metaphysics of it, but everyone knows its grave real-life consequences.
A few days ago, my cousin was trying to convince me to buy a new pair of running shoes. He sent me a ChatGPT link that compared models of running shoes, which pulled content from actual websites where expert runners invested money, time, and energy to compare running shoes in different areas in complex detail. In the end, all of their effort was just fodder for ChatGPT. Further click-throughs to the actual websites were inconvenient and unnecessary, which meant no revenues for those searches.
Publishers are shutting down. Writers are packing it up. Countless other workers are getting replaced by AI right this moment.
So AI not only destroys human essence in its stripping away of labor-created value, it also cuts off human life support in the way it's actively purging real livelihoods.
In its current form, left to wreak havoc in people's lives as technology companies abandon content creators in the abyss to focus on optimizing their LLMs that require larger and larger amounts of human experiences to harvest, AI is nothing but a lab experiment gone wrong.
Instead of asking why content creation—blog content or otherwise—should even be a viable marketing strategy in the age of AI, a more profound question to ask would be why in just a few years, we went from seeking expert advice and diverse forms of content to demanding only the finished product.
We used to ask "Is this information verified?" "Who wrote this piece of crap?" "What are your credentials for saying that?"
Now we just take whatever an AI platform tells us and run with it. Oftentimes because in doing so, we can edge out others who are lagging behind in technology. In competitiveness.
Sure, it makes our lives more convenient. What could be the harm in learning Ancient Rome from a series of prompts? Do we really have to learn how to change our car's oil from an actual mechanic?
It's hard to fault users because they understandably must always find ways to make life just a little bit more bearable. But at the very least, everyone should be aware of the cost, so that we're not like cows blindly herded to a slaughterhouse.
And as digital marketers, I wish we would not put the cart before the horse. Content creation in whatever form is not the issue. It's the all-seeing, algorithmic harvester of human essences squeezing content into addictive capitalist productivity juice that's the problem.
I wish I could hear exactly what Marx would say.
Wait a minute.
Let me just enter that prompt into ChatGPT.