Burning retinas, AI, and Grails .

Greetings from the Path of Totality, where our entire team totally didn’t take the afternoon off to squint into the sky through cereal boxes.

When we’re not out here enjoying the finest our solar system has to offer, we’re busy working on some serious galaxy-brain-level projects that we’re very excited to share with the universe. From photo shoots in Brazil to recording videos with Barcelona-based 90s rappers to building out new webinar branding for a certain retail company that rhymes with Whamazon, the LHC team is ready for our moon shot. Sadly, however, we lost the bid for this experiential marketing execution in Glasgow. 

But anyway, enough about us, let’s talk about AI (alas, not him).

You can’t believe what you read (except for the following)

It may shock you to learn that there be some scamming happening on the ol’ internet. 

If it’s not Moldovan troll farms or Russian bots promising [REDACTED] in bio, it’s a scammer asking you to put $50,000 in a shoebox or telling you that you’re late to your own grandmother’s funeral. 

Naturally, ChatGPT has become the latest Swiss Army knife for any budding grifter. And, of course, ChatGPT is itself a scammer of sorts, albeit of the semi-sentient robot mansplainer variety, offering up tremendously incorrect answers with the overwhelming confidence of a mediocre white man.

Not to sound like a high school freshman who just watched The Matrix for the first time, but nothing is real anymore. 

To be clear, we’re not anti-AI (or even anti-scammer… if you know a faster way to make $50K, we’re all ears). But we are spending a lot of time thinking about what this means for the future of our industry. In a world where technology purports to be capable of handling everything from creative brainstorming to the execution itself, we’re left wondering what our value is. 

Don’t worry. This isn’t going to be some tragic essay about the downfall of art. 

We’re far too opportunistic for that. 

This is about the increasing value of trust, and how brands can go about building it. That’s because there will only be two kinds of brands going forward: the companies you truly trust and the companies who have outsourced their operations to AI (or worse, an inept hitman…look, not our best transition, but we did feel it was our professional duty to share this story with you).  

So, how do we think about building trust? 

Well, for starters, we use a lot of line breaks. 

Beyond that, we make sure that you know who you are as a brand — and who you aren’t. Because once you nail that down, you can start operating from a place of authenticity and transparency.  Yes, yes, those are buzzwords. But they matter now more than ever, and should be the cornerstone of all your interactions across all your channels. 

That’s going to be the big difference between working with humans and working with bots — whether it’s 1:1 or at scale. Fewer and fewer companies will be able to create trust, because trust takes time, and thoughtfulness, and (at least for now), it takes a human touch. 

Recent work