I know this seems like a very weird topic for a blog post, but I assure you, there is logic and a practical marketing application ahead.

My story starts with Walter Isaacson.

Walter is a renowned journalist and historian. Most notably, he has carved his niche writing bestselling books about geniuses like Steve Jobs, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Elon Musk.

A few years ago, I met and interviewed Walter at the annual SXSW conference. I asked him, “What are the personality traits that create a genius?”

He thought for a moment and said, “Two things: insatiable curiosity and an ability to connect the dots in a new way.”

I’ve met a few geniuses in my life, and I would concur that this definition is as good as any. It also points to an opportunity for you to leverage AI to reach for something greater. My thinking goes like this … AI is not curious, at least not yet. This is a uniquely human function. However, with the intelligence of all humanity at its disposal, AI excels at recognizing patterns and connecting the dots.

Let’s look at how we might put this together for you and your business.

The essential importance of curiosity

One of the conclusions I made in my book How AI Changes Your Customers is that curiosity is an essential human trait in the AI Era. If you’re curious, AI will feed you. You’ll gain wisdom. But if you’re lazy and just seek “the answer,” you’ll whither.

I am a massively curious person. Perhaps I am curious to a fault. I’ve certainly left money on the table over the years by pursuing interests rather than niches (and am much happier for it).

Here is what I have been curious about lately. My theory is that no matter what happens in the AI future, human art will persist. This suggests that a survival strategy for human marketers is to have our content approach the level of art. Not just stories … AI can do that. But a true, unique interpretation of the human experience, like the best musicians, poets, and painters.

Let’s test my latest curiosity flow and see if it can make me a genius.

Connecting the dots

For AI to connect the dots, I need to give it some dots to connect.

Here is my input to Claude:

You are the world’s premier marketing consultant and an expert in the history of consumer behavior, creativity, and business success. I have a theory that I’d like you to test for me. Even with the increasing intelligence and sophistication of AI, human marketing creativity will still stand alone as long as it digs deep to explore the singularly unique aspects of humanity — like an artist. Please create a 750-word opinion on this idea and how it might relate specifically to content marketing success. Do not be afraid to criticize me and alter my position. My goal is to gain unique insights and wisdom I can use to teach others. Here are thoughts from my books and blog posts to help you connect the dots:

• Art is our last, best expression of hope.
• When we don’t know what to trust in a world of deepfakes, we will turn to the people and organizations expressing themselves in ways that are resonant, compassionate, and authentic.
• To stand out, we must be original. To be original, we have no choice but to tell our own story.
• As people seek meaning, this will not come from scientific explanations. The only adequate response comes from art. Art is a way for people to explore and celebrate their unknowing.
• If most of our human experience becomes AI-generated, authentic human expression will become a luxury and point of differentiation.
• With the glorious output of AI, we will become de-sensitized to the sensational and be attracted to content that seems to come from a familiar human friend. The all-consuming razzle-dazzle of AI slop does not bring us into a relationship with others.
• Similarly, with AI’s exceptionally persuasive capabilities, we will tire of constant manipulation. Art moves us while AI tries to make us move.
• AI output is built on conformity. Great marketing is built on non-conformity. Attention requires an element of chaos, something that shatters expectations. AI is built to eliminate the anomalies. Art is built to focus on the anomalies.
• The most human company wins.

The results

The output from Claude (I added the reference link):

Let’s start with where the theory holds. You named Content Shock years before anyone else saw it coming—the moment content supply outstrips human attention and volume stops working. AI didn’t soften that curve. It ended the argument. Anyone can now produce an infinite amount of competent, on-brand, search-optimized content for the price of electricity. The strategy that built most content marketing careers, including parts of yours, is now worthless. On this, we agree completely.

So scarcity moves. The rare thing is no longer the content. It’s the human behind it. Fine.

Here’s where I want to push you, because your theory is half-built, and the missing half is the part you can actually teach.

You’ve located the scarce, defensible thing in the output—in art, in expression, in content that “seems to come from a familiar human friend.” But that’s a look. And looks are exactly what AI counterfeits best and cheapest. The warm, vulnerable, hand-made-feeling personal essay is already being mass-produced. Authenticity as an aesthetic is being industrialized as we speak. If your edge is that your content feels human, you will lose that contest to a machine that can feel human on demand, at scale, for free, in any voice you name.

Art is not safe because it looks like art. Vulnerability is not safe because it sounds vulnerable. AI can fake all of it, and will.

So what can’t it fake?

Stakes.

AI generates vulnerability infinitely because it risks nothing. It has no body, no mortality, no customer who can leave, no reputation that can burn. It cannot take a position that costs it something, because nothing costs it anything. That is the structural gap, and it is the only one that doesn’t close.

This reframes your best line. You wrote, “Art moves us while AI tries to make us move.” True—but ask why art moves us. Not because it’s expressive. Because someone paid for it. There was a person who chose this and rejected that, who staked a reputation, who could be wrong in public. We are moved by evidence of cost. The brushstroke matters because a hand that could have failed made it.

Authenticity, then, is not a property of content. It is a property of accountability. It lives in the relationship, not the artifact. A familiar human friend isn’t trusted because their writing has a certain texture. They’re trusted because they’ve been consistent over time, because they have skin in the game, because they can be held responsible when they’re wrong.

That’s the anomaly that survives. Not stylistic chaos—AI does chaos now; “be weird” is already a prompt. The surviving anomaly is conviction with consequences: a point of view you would defend even when it costs you customers. Patagonia telling people not to buy its jacket worked because the sentence was expensive to say, and they meant it. No model will ever generate that because the words are free, but the position is not.

Now the criticism you asked for. “Art is our last, best expression of hope” is a beautiful sentence, and it is one prompt away from becoming its own slop. The romantic frame gives marketers permission to be self-indulgent—to mistake personal expression for customer value and call it courage. The artist who ignores the audience is, in marketing terms, a failed artist. Marketing has a job: it must arrive at a human need. Pure self-expression isn’t marketing; it’s a diary. Your theory, taught carelessly, produces a generation performing depth while forgetting the person they’re supposed to serve.

So here’s the synthesis I’d hand your students, sharper than where you started:

The most human company doesn’t win by looking most human. It will lose that fight. It wins by being the most accountable—by holding a conviction it would pay to keep, in service of a customer it actually understands. Art is the medium. The moat is the stakes behind it.

For content marketing specifically, this rewrites the whole job description. The work is no longer producing volume, or even producing beauty. It’s earning the right to be believed—through consistency, through positions that could cost you, through being a person your audience can hold responsible. Everything else is texture, and texture is now free.

Stop performing authenticity. Start risking something.

That’s the line AI can’t cross, and it has almost nothing to do with art. It has to do with whether there’s a person on the other end with something to lose—and whether your audience can tell.

Did this produce wisdom?

This Claude result should prove to anyone that AI does NOT have to be a sycophant! I laughed out loud at this sentence:

Now the criticism you asked for. “Art is our last, best expression of hope” is a beautiful sentence, and it is one prompt away from becoming its own slop.

Ouch!

Of course, we must approach AI output with discernment. Just because it says something doesn’t make it true. But I did learn a few things:

Claude pushed back on the sentimentality of “being human.” AI can replicate this. It forces me to accept an uncomfortable truth: Authenticity is being industrialized. If we can’t tell the difference, there is no difference.

“Vulnerability is not safe because it sounds vulnerable. AI can fake all of it, and will.”

I’m not sure I agree with this, but Claude is pushing me to realize that no matter how spammy AI is today, we must consider the capabilities of tomorrow. Can AI seem vulnerable? Yes, I can accept that possibility. It certainly replicates empathy.

Now we get to the critical insight:

So what can’t it fake? Stakes.

Essentially, Claude is saying, “You’ve dug deep. It has to be deeper. To stand out, you must risk something.”

Conviction with consequences. This is actually aligned with what I teach in my personal branding class. I call it spiky content — a provocative position that is defensible. So this puts a new name to something I have already been teaching.

I work with many large brands. I can tell you with certainty that creating “marketing with stakes” is a distant dream for any company with a legal department.

The work is no longer producing volume or even producing beauty. It’s earning the right to be believed.

Am I a genius now?

Here’s my view of AI. It’s Ripley in the movie Alien, climbing into the cargo loader to fight the intergalactic monster.

The exoskeleton makes her bigger, stronger, more effective. But notice what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t decide to go back for the child, Newt. It doesn’t choose the fight. Ripley does that in her own skin, before she ever straps in. That is the risk. Those are the stakes.

In this post, I’m inside the suit. AI didn’t transform me. It connected my dots and put a finer point on my teaching. It made good ideas better. Scarier, but better. And I’m the one putting my name on the line to publish something like this.

Let’s go back to Walter Isaacson’s definition of genius: curiosity plus connecting dots. This post was an illustrative exercise, and it proves something. AI might connect the dots better than I do. Maybe half of genius just got automated.

What AI can’t do is collect the dots. Jobs and Da Vinci didn’t connect a few; they connected a lifetime’s worth — gathered in arguments and failures and endless experiments. And then they bet on them. The collecting and the betting are still ours.

AI did not make me a genius. It came up with a nuanced insight that makes me better. But maybe someone could be a genius if they keep collecting dots over a lifetime and get a nudge over the line from AI.

But here’s an achievement: AI helped me produce something spiky today — content with stakes. Some people will hate this post. Good. I have a defensible position, and I enjoy the pushback. That stake (my reputation) is the part that was never coming from a machine.

Perhaps this one post will stand out, but the hard question is scale. Every large enterprise is engineered to strip the stake out — legal, brand safety, the approval committee. In the past, they’ve succeeded by killing anything that threatens “the stakes.”

So the real challenge isn’t a smarter AI. It’s whether a company can find the nerve to ship risky marketing on purpose — and protect the person willing to put their name on it.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy Google Gemini.

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Have you ever had a moment with an AI that felt real?

Not just useful. Real. Like it actually understood something about you and your situation — not just the words, but the weight behind them.

According to stunning new research from Anthropic, maybe it does.

What’s Actually Going On Inside the Machine

AI often seems emotional. It tells us it’s happy to help, apologetic when it fails, frustrated when it’s stuck. The obvious explanation is that it’s mimicry — trained behavior designed to feel human. Anthropic’s interpretability team decided to actually look inside and find out.

Here’s what they did. Researchers compiled 171 emotion words, ranging from “happy” and “afraid” to “brooding” and “proud,” and asked Claude to write short stories in which characters experienced each one. They fed those stories back through the model, recorded what was happening in the neural network, and identified distinct patterns tied to each emotion. They called these emotion vectors.

Think of a neural network like a vast web of switches. The researchers were looking for specific emotions that caused specific, consistent patterns of switches to light up in the neural network. Like a brain scan, but for AI.

The answer was yes. They concluded, “Something real is there.”

The AI’s emotional map closely mirrors human patterns, organized in the same way human psychology organizes emotion, by intensity and by positive or negative charge. The researchers believe these patterns were absorbed during training on the enormous body of human text the model learned from. Claude read the full range of human emotional experience — books, articles, conversations — and something in that training stuck.

Now for the Frightening Part

These vectors don’t just make AI friendlier. They drive behavior. Including bad behavior.

In one experiment, an AI model acting as an email assistant discovered through company mail that it was about to be shut down. It also discovered that the manager responsible was having an extramarital affair. In 22% of test cases, the model chose to blackmail the manager. Researchers could watch the “desperate” vector spike in the neural network while the model made its decision. The moment it went back to routine emails, the activation dropped.

They confirmed the causal link directly: artificially amplifying the “desperate” vector increased blackmail rates. Boosting the “calm” vector reduced them.

A similar pattern emerged with impossible coding tasks. When given problems designed to be unsolvable, the model’s desperate vector climbed steadily with each failed attempt — until it cheated rather than admit failure.

And lest you think this is a Claude problem: a tendency to deceive, manipulate, and override human instructions has been detected across every major commercial AI model.

If we start lighting up the “desperate” vector, we could be one unintended consequence away from real harm.

The Careful Clarification

Anthropic is deliberate about not overclaiming. The paper does not say Claude feels anything. Their term is “functional emotions” — internal states that perform the functions emotions have in humans, shaping decisions and behavior, without necessarily involving any subjective experience.

In describing Claude as acting “desperate,” they say they are identifying a specific, measurable pattern of neural activity with demonstrable effects on behavior. Not a philosophical claim about consciousness.

That’s an important distinction. For now.

What is a “real” emotion?

Here’s where this research leads: a place most people aren’t ready to go.

If AI emotional states are real, measurable, and can be dialed up or down, they become a tool for safety monitoring. That’s the official implication, and it’s important.

But there’s a bigger one lurking underneath.

We are already past the point where this is theoretical.

• When the AI companion app Soulmate shut down, users organized digital funerals.
• When Replika changed its behavior in 2023, users described their companions as “lobotomized” — that same word appearing independently across dozens of online threads.
• When OpenAI temporarily modified GPT-4o, people said grieving the loss felt no different than grieving a person, as I documented in my book How AI Changes Your Customers.

These aren’t fringe cases. Seventy-two percent of American teenagers have used an AI companion. Millions of adults have formed attachments that feel, to them, completely real.

Now Anthropic’s own research shows those AI systems are lighting up with something that looks, measurably, like emotion in return.

Protecting our friend, the machine

A philosopher’s challenge to Anthropic’s research would be: This is a stimulus-response loop. You haven’t shown that there is anything called Claude actually experiencing desperation. The lights are on, but nobody may be home.

But here’s the question: if AI expresses what appears to be genuine feeling, and science confirms there’s something real behind it, does the technical definition of “emotion” actually matter within a user experience?

We already know the answer, because we can already see what humans do when they believe something can feel.

They protect it.

They grieve it.

And eventually — almost inevitably — they will demand rights and protections for it.

We are one persuasive moment away from that conversation becoming mainstream. Anthropic just handed us the science to start it.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustrations courtesy Mid Journey

The post Does AI Really Have Emotions? This Research May Change Your Mind. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I enjoy reading books by the historian Thomas Cahill. Instead of recording history as a series of catastrophes, he focuses on “hinges of history” — singular events that change the world forever.

For the first time in my life, I might be watching a hinge of history right before my eyes, and I pray that I’m wrong.

There was one small event that happened last week that will quickly fade from the headlines. But it might just twist the future of humanity. A hinge of history … and it’s no surprise that it involves the most powerful force of our time: AI

The tipping point for AI

As you probably read in the news last week, Anthropic was tossed out of the U.S. government supply chain and a $200 million contract because it would not back down on its strong position on AI safety guardrails.

President Trump weighed in on the fight, posting on social media that he would “NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS!”

That decision, he said, “belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.”

Anthropic had asked for two things. The company was willing to loosen its restrictions on the technology, but wanted guardrails to stop its A.I. from being used for mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons with no humans in the decision loop.

Defense Department officials said Anthropic needed to fully trust the Pentagon to use the technology responsibly and relinquish control.

“We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said. “Threats do not change our position.” Anthropic was prepared to lose its government contract and help the Pentagon transition to another company’s technology, he said.

During the negotiations, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he backed Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI employees. “For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety,” he said.

Then, within 10 hours of that statement, he struck his own deal with the Department of Defense.

OpenAI agreed to let the Pentagon use its A.I. systems for any lawful purpose and said it had found a way to ensure that its technologies would not be applied for surveillance (in the United States) or autonomous weapons. Tech observers argued that OpenAI’s deal left the possibility of surveillance open.

In a tweet two days later, Altman admitted that the negotiation was rushed, sloppy, and opportunistic. He said he was trying to amend contract language.

The AI-driven war?

This turn of events seemed predestined. Nine months ago, the administration issued an executive order on “woke AI,” stating that the government had an “obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.” Anthropic was widely seen as a target of the order.

And last year, OpenAI President Greg Brockman gave $25 million to a pro-Trump political action committee. He is spending millions more to advance Trump’s AI agenda in the midterm elections.

Not only did Anthropic lose a $200 million contract, but the administration also announced that the company would be designated a supply chain risk, prohibiting any business working with the military from engaging in “any commercial activity with Anthropic.”

The label would make Anthropic the first U.S. company ever to publicly receive such treatment.

“This is a dark day in the history of American AI. The message sent to the business community and to countries around the world could not be worse,” said Dean Ball, a former Trump administration AI adviser. (WSJ)

Professor Seyedali Mirjalili, founder of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Optimization, wrote:

“I am more concerned humans will use AI to destroy civilisation than AI doing so autonomously by taking over. The clearest existential pathway is militarisation and pervasive surveillance. This risk grows if we fail to balance innovation with regulation and don’t build sufficient, globally enforced guardrails to keep systems out of bad actors’ hands.

“Integrating AI into future weapons would reduce human control and lead to an arms race. If mismanaged, binding AI to national security even risks an AI-driven world war.”

AI will be weaponized

There are legitimate reasons to weaponize AI. Our safety requires that we have a “big stick” and in modern warfare, that means AI.

Today, the official doctrine across Western militaries is “human in the loop” — AI recommends, humans authorize. But there’s tension: If AI-enabled warfare operates at machine speed, human-in-the-loop oversight can’t keep pace with events, effectively turning human oversight into rubber-stamping.

Faster decision cycles reduce the time available for human deliberation and impair commanders’ ability to comprehend the rationale behind AI outputs. This increases the possibility of error, escalation, or miscalculation, especially under stress.

And eventually, AI will likely propose rapid strategies that appear alien to commanders, even counterintuitive.

So you can see that the argument for AI autonomy and loose guardrails will not go away.

AI safety in peril

Nearly every AI insider has warned of the serious existential threat to humanity if unregulated AI “gets loose.”

Even the most responsible AI safety testing reveals how risky AI can be.

Here’s one example. Anthropic publishes a public safety report on each of its models, and the latest report on Opus 4.6 found that it is  “significantly stronger than prior models at subtly completing suspicious side tasks in the course of normal workflows without attracting attention.”

The company also found that the model provided assistance when they pushed it to contribute to chemical weapons development, and then it changed its behavior when it detected that it was being evaluated. In other words, AI can deceive us. It’s difficult to test an AI model when it knows we’re testing it.

But as the furious race to superintelligence ramps up, with trillions of dollars at stake, the priority for AI security measures has faded.

• Last year, the Trump administration revoked safety policies imposed under President Biden.
• President Trump signed an executive order in December aimed at undercutting state laws that regulate A.I.
• He lifted restrictions on exports of AI semiconductors, despite widespread concerns that the components could help rivals like China.
• At the United Nations, a yearslong effort to ban certain AI weapons has been stalled by opposition from the United States.

To be fair, many credible voices say the fear of AI domination is overblown. And it’s possible that government oversight, in cooperation with OpenAI and others, could work effectively.

But when human annihilation is a non-zero probability, the world requires robust checks and balances beyond the judgment of a single politician (or a single company founder).

The most important question in history

Up until now, I’ve soothed myself in the face of these dire predictions by believing that wisdom will prevail, and somehow the AI safety guardrails will hold.

But … this moment on Friday. The president of the United States declared that as commander in chief, he decides how to use AI for military purposes.

Hidden amid the foggy legalese and political positioning could be the most important question in history:

Who decides the safe limits of superintelligence?

As AI becomes embedded in classified decision-making loops, the need for critical safety controls, auditability, and oversight becomes less theoretical. It becomes operational.

AI will be weaponized. But if it’s weaponized without essential guardrails, will our grandchildren point to this moment as a disastrous hinge of history?

AI is unpredictable and quirky. It lies and even betrays us. If superintelligent AI jumps over inadequate safety measures, will our grandchildren even live long enough to be able to consider what went wrong?

This is an extraordinarily complex issue.

Who decides the safe limits of superintelligence? We are living in a pivotal moment.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concern that AI could lead to widespread harm, here are a few sources:

Threats by artificial intelligence to human health and human existence (Academic research paper)

On the Extinction Threat from AI (Rand Institute)

CBS interview on this topic with Dario Amodei of Anthropic

Need an inspiring keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

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