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The Majority AI View, The All AI TikTok Clone, and A New Kind Of Storytelling Inspired By YouTube

Ten creative links that inspired us this week

Author

Anjali Ramachandran
October 24, 2025

B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN

👋🏼 Hello

This week, we went to TBD+ to see Jade McQueen, VP of Media & Entertainment at Box, talk about content in an age of AI. You can get a ticket for TBD’s annual conference next March, happening in London, here.

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📕 The Short Story

The Majority AI View (5-min read)

📣 Big Pivots (15-min read and photo gallery) 📣

❝

“People worry that not being seen as mindless, uncritical AI cheerleaders will be a career-limiting move in the current environment of enforced conformity within tech, especially as tech leaders are collaborating with the current regime to punish free speech, fire anyone who dissents, and embolden the wealthy tycoons at the top to make ever-more-extreme statements, often at the direct expense of some of their own workers.”

Anil Dash

📚 The Long Story

The Majority AI View (5-min read)
Long-time internet commentator Anil Dash has a thought-provoking post. He says the most common opinion about AI by those actually in the field is not mentioned enough: “Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.”

Scary: A Paranormal Podcast (Podcast)
Emma Greengrass from the Storythings team is a big fan of the spooky stuff, and in the run-up to Halloween she recommends this podcast, which might be what some of you are looking for?! It also won two Signal Awards recently: Gold in Best Paranormal or Horror Podcast and Bronze in Driveway Moment Podcast. Have at it.

Humans of New York Transforms Grand Central Into A Monumental Photo Show (5-min read)
Everyone’s favourite documentary photo project, Humans of New York, took over Grand Central station with what is New York’s largest public installation in 20 years. It is a testament to the power of a brilliant creative idea - when Brandon Stanton started HONY back in the day, I doubt he would have envisioned this as its evolution.

Creativity Benchmark: Findings From The Advertising Industry’s First LLM Creativity Study (Report)
I took part in this research a few months ago, so I was interested to see the results: Springboards has published the first LLM Creativity Benchmark study results in advertising, which looked at how creative the various LLM tools we use are. Somewhat expected: there is no clear model winner, but some deliver better creative spread than others. You can read the full report here and a one-pager here.

15 Different Story Structures (PDF List)
Jeremy Connell-Waite from IBM created the Better Stories website a while ago. Hugh shared this resource on story structures from there (via friend of Storythings Steve Bryant), and I was reminded how useful it is to look at every now and then.

Japanese Convenience Stores Are Hiring Robots Run By Workers In The Philippines (9-min read)
This is ‘absolutely nuts’, as Matt said in our team Slack channel. It is also an increasingly slippery slope: yes, transferring automated jobs from more expensive markets to less expensive ones like the Philippines is how capitalism works, but employees of these AI startups also go “from losing their job to the machine, to basically becoming the watcher of the machine doing the work”, as professor of robotics at the University of Michigan, Lionel Roberts, said.

SORA: The All AI TikTok Clone. Will Slop End Creativity? (8-min watch)
Casey Neistat explores Sora, an app which mimics TikTok using AI videos. He talks to people about how they’re using it, and discusses what it means for content creation. Are we ‘feeble humans’ truly no match for the almighty slop, as the video’s description says?! I would strongly argue we are!

How Kai Cenat’s 30-Day Mafiathon Stream Made History (6-min read)
Twitch user Kai Cenat ran a 24/7 stream for 30 days: all of September. He had 1 million+ subscribers tuning in, $5 million pledged to charity, a live haircut by LeBron James on day 30…the list of achievements goes on. As he says though, it is all about the planning, something we’re very familiar with at Storythings: “It’s really about the mental preparation. Being able to keep your chat entertained for 30 days straight. Most performers have to do it live for 2–4 hours. Live streaming is 4–8 hours usually but 100x that pace when it’s 24/7 for the whole month. It’s about making sure everyday is planned out ahead of time. Things can go left and content can create itself or come to you, but having that plan in place incase content doesn’t make itself, is CRUCIAL. The planning is truly the biggest hurdle.”

How A YouTube Trend Inspired A New Kind Of Storytelling (15-min read)
I like David Epstein’s writing in general, but reading his interview with Sports Illustrated journalist Pablo Torre about the latter’s podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out made my mind explode in many different ways - because it is a genius idea. The two chat about the format of the podcast, which is a combination of investigative journalism and the principle of unboxing videos. You’ll just have to read the whole thing, or better still, listen to the podcast! On that note, here’s your regular reminder to subscribe to our Formats Unpacked newsletter if you haven’t already.

Can The White House Just….Do This? (Instagram video)
Harvard Law spouses and Instagram/TikTok creators Maclean and Ashleigh Stanley weigh in on fair use in social media. They break down a recent White House post, where a Parks and Recreation clip was used in a somewhat murky way, let’s say.

📣 Big Pivots (15-min read and photo gallery) 📣
From the archives, a photo essay I really like from our work for payroll giant ADP. COVID-19 caused a lot of people to change their field of work, for many different reasons. We spoke to 4 people from Thailand, Canada, Tunisia and the UK who did.

💌 Humans of LinkedIn

Welcome back to the section where we highlight interesting people saying interesting things on LinkedIn. This week, I loved this post by Charlotte West, Vice President - Global Corporate Communications at Lenovo, about the qualities we need in communications leaders of the future. She references the Ipsos Reputation Council 2025 report. Here’s why Charlotte loved it:

“We’re not talking enough as an industry about the people who will lead through this increasingly dynamic landscape. What skills will tomorrow’s communications professionals need, and more importantly, where will we find them?”

Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!

Have a great weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team

B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN

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