Category: content design

Effective Content in the AI Era: Thriving in a Three-Force Audience Ecosystem

Effective Content in the AI Era: Thriving in a Three-Force Audience Ecosystem

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

When I created the Three-Force Audience Model for my July blog post, I focused on the endpoints.

The reader. The AI system. The community.

But afterward, I found myself thinking more about the spaces between them.

After all, these forces don’t operate independently. A reader asks an AI system a question. Someone brings the AI-generated answer into a professional discussion. That community discusses, challenges, or reinforces the idea and seeks further sources. Each interaction can change how information is understood—and what happens to it next.

That makes the spaces between the endpoints at least as interesting as the endpoints themselves.

So, for this follow-up, I went back to the Three-Force Audience Model and added arrows to represent the multi-way interactions among the three forces.

What they reveal is a more dynamic picture of today’s content environment—and some important implications for those of us who create and manage content.

How the Three Audience Forces Interact

The audience ecosystem I introduced last month should move us, as content creators, beyond the notion of a single audience type for our content. Instead, our content exists within an ecosystem shaped by three very different audience forces.

Given that, we must accept that there is no single type of interaction with our content—or even a single audience flow. Audiences interact with our content at any point along their journeys to or from it. As they do, they can add meaning that, in turn, can help us improve and even expand the original concept.

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Designing Content for AI Summaries: A Practical Guide for Communicators

Designing Content for AI Summaries: A Practical Guide for Communicators

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

There’s a certain irony in admitting this, but I recently struggled to write the introduction to one of my blog posts, “Agent vs Agency in GenAI Adoption: Framing Ethical Governance.” I wanted to frame the topic with a reflection on evolving terminology, a nod to Hamlet, and a meditation on AI’s “nature.” On top of that, I introduced the idea of the “ghost in the machine” only a few paragraphs later. In hindsight, I had written two introductions to the same post without meaning to.

At the time, the ideas felt connected. But when I later ran those paragraphs through an AI summarizer, the summary focused almost entirely on Hamlet’s moral dilemma and the mind–body problem—interesting concepts, certainly, but hardly the point of the post. The AI confidently reported that the blog was “about comparing the adoption of GenAI to Hamlet’s struggle with death.”

Not exactly the message I intended.

To be fair here, the most recent version of Google’s Gemini gave me a much more comprehensive summary. That summary mentions, as I did, “the tensions inherent in adopting Generative AI” and my proposed “governance framework.”

But looking back, I realize I had made two classic mistakes in writing that introduction—mistakes that human readers can forgive with patience but AI summarizers absolutely cannot. First, I opened with a metaphor instead of a clear point. Second, I layered multiple conceptual frameworks (terminology, nature vs. nurture, Hamlet, Koestler, agency) before stating my purpose. I know better. Many of us do. But as I’ve written elsewhere, expertise doesn’t exempt us from the structural pitfalls that now matter more than ever.

That experience became the seed of this post.

If our writing can be so easily misinterpreted by a summarizer—and thus by downstream readers who rely on that summary—then it’s worth rethinking what it means to write clearly and responsibly in an AI-influenced world. Good writing has always been about serving our readers. Now, increasingly, it must also serve the machine readers that bridge the gap between our content and those readers.

In this post, I explore why AI summarizers can distort meaning, how machines “read” what we write, and how we can design content that preserves accuracy, nuance, and intent—even after it’s digested by AI. (Note: Some content in this blog post was generated by ChatGPT.)

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Thistle-Tomes

Thistle-Tomes

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

The following are my 2024 short takes on all things content in life and work:

  1. No one is an expert on AI yet. Take everything with a grain of salt.
  2. Sustainability should be part of every content strategy and content project.
  3. Lack of specificity on websites can be both a friend and an enemy. Vagueness can leave room for negotiation but also misinterpretation.
  4. Jargon in customer-facing content can be a significant barrier to understanding and engagement.
  5. Something I like to call “name theory” says that what you call something matters. And it doesn’t have to rhyme with “oom.”
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Chunking for More Accessible Online Content 

Chunking for More Accessible Online Content 

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

In our omnichannel world, where attention spans are short and the cognitive load is great (thanks, AI!), effective content design plays a key role in reader engagement. It’s more important than ever to structure online text so that our readers can easily scan, understand, and retain the key points.

Double underline that for readers who rely on accessibility aids such as screen readers.

The element of content design you’ll want to apply is “chunking.” Chunking refers to breaking up information into meaningful, bite-sized sections or “chunks” that are relatively similar in scope and intensity. Visually, this means that your paragraphs are short, and there are fewer of them under each subheading.

Richard Johnson-Sheehan, the technical communication guru, generally refers to this idea as “partitioning.” Rather than presenting a dense wall of text, you divide your content into well-organized subsections with meaningful headings.

I offer some techniques for applying this element of content design here. However, the starting point is to understand how chunking aids the reader.

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