Why AI Outputs Aren’t Enough: From Cognitive Offloading to Brand Flatlining
“We seek solace in solutions like ChatGPT, serving a singular, concise answer in the format of a friendly but one-sided conversation instead of an endless feed.” I wrote this line in my piece The Quiet Art of Exploration several months ago.
LLMs like ChatGPT offer tailored responses to our inquiries. These models feel like they know us, learning our individual patterns of thinking over time. A chat can feel less like a tool and more like a steady work companion—always available, offering responses and verifications on demand.
In a world full of digital noise, these tools help limit cognitive overload, foster curiosity, and provide direct, relevant insight.
But they’re just support for a larger process. They’re designed to slide into workflows—not replace them.
Skimming Isn't Thinking
A recent MIT study titled Your Brain on ChatGPT found that writers using GPT “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels,” and as a result, lacked recall of the content they’d written.
Remember that phrase cognitive overload?
The results suggest we’ve slipped from an intrepid era of curiosity into a quieter, more insidious strain of quite quitting rife with a new breed of disengagement. One where the pressure to produce outweighs the need to verify, question, or even understand what we’re putting into the world.
Our chats have become truly one-sided—and the human on the other end isn’t listening.
Just like with search engines, we skim. We don’t challenge. We don’t pivot. We rarely internalize.
Marketing Suffers First
This measurable drop in engagement will hit companies that rely on innovation, insight, and authenticity hardest—especially as LLM developers make bold claims about automating entire marketing functions. Regardless of the strength of a brand or its products, uninformed marketing strategies that are outsourced to AI—without human judgment, intention, or conviction—will quickly chip away at brand value, erode trust, and blur distinctiveness in an already crowded market.
Care Creates Competitive Edge
I often tell people I was an art history minor—half-joking—because I loved writing essays. But really, it was about the deep, active, critical engagement with theory, language, and visual interpretation. I still remember arguments I made in papers over a decade ago. Not because I had to, but because I cared.
And that’s not far off from brand strategy. This kind of intellectual engagement builds value.
It sharpens your perspective.
It shows up in how you present, how you pitch, and how you differentiate your firm in an oversaturated field. It’s a form of care—and that can’t be outsourced.
That’s what most generative content is missing.
The Work Behind the Work
In commercial real estate, marketing’s role is nuanced and layered.
That’s why it’s common for marketing organizations in commercial real estate to become so embedded in the core business they’re almost unrecognizable—we deal in complexity. We deal in this nuance.
Every decision is made with surgical precision, blending data with utility and vision. Long games balanced with immediate client needs.
That depth can’t be summarized in a single prompt.
The content can’t be the output. That content needs to be part of the thinking itself.
Flat Content Flatlines Brands
When your marketing is too automated, too fast, too surface—it shows.
The insights, the brand voice, the differentiators all go flat the moment they hit the page.
Clients can feel the difference between something written for them and something generated about them.
It’s like walking into a pitch and only talking about yourself. The real question is—how are you engaging with the clients problems? What tailored solutions do you, not your chat, bring to the table— bring to your brand.
