Why the Room Is the Last Place That’s Real

AI creep is shifting the job of brands from reach to reality

In the car with my five-year-old yesterday, it hit me with a creeping unease that virtually every kids’ song Spotify shuffled to was AI-generated.

If the too-smooth, hyper-saturated cartoon characters on the cover art weren’t an immediate tell, then the songs were—frictionless, hollow, engineered to loop, with about as much soul as a set of windshield wipers.

My daughter didn’t notice. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

What I realized (other than that I owe my kid some better music curation) was how far AI has crept into the margins of everyday life, even places I haven’t thought to look, like a Silicon Valley version of The Blob.

I’m hearing it in the scripts creators on TikTok are reading verbatim. I’m reading it in the comments under posts on Instagram. I’m even seeing it in private group chats, in messages that sound a little too polished.

We’ve been talking about AI in terms of job losses and creativity collapse and OMG-have-you-heard-about-that-famous-actor-with-the-AI-girlfriend?! But I think we’re underestimating something even more disorienting: an emerging, shared suspicion that everything might be fake. The song. The message. The review. The face.

And when everything might be fake, the only antidote becomes whatever is undeniably, unimpeachably real.

Which is why we’re seeing people engineer reasons to be together IRL these days.

Run clubs replacing dating apps. “Offline” nights where phones get checked at the door. Packed reading parties in New York City and Los Angeles where the whole point is just sitting in a room together.

Here’s what that means if you’re building a brand right now.

For the last decade, brands chased scale—impressions, distribution, algorithmic lift. But you can't algorithm your way to trust. And in a world where everything is suspect, somewhere real beats being everywhere algorithmic.

So focus on the room. Because the room is the one thing that can’t be faked.

Who’s in it? Why are they there? What actually happens when they show up? What would make them come back and bring someone with them next time? Those are the questions worth obsessing over.

That doesn’t mean abandoning digital. It means using it as an invitation. Your content should point to something real: a gathering, a ritual, a moment people can actually feel. Not just “I saw it.” I was there.

You can’t put a million people in a room. But you can build something that makes a thousand people wish they were there.

Build that first. Then let the internet do what it does.

Until next time,

Sara

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The brands that will matter most in the next decade won’t have the biggest reach. They’ll convene the best rooms.

That’s exactly what I help brands build inside the Community Catalyst—my 8-week engagement for brands $35M–$300M+ in revenue. We identify the communities that already matter to your audience, and we figure out how to show up there in ways that are impossible to fake.

I have one spot left for Q3. Reply CATALYST if you want in.