The POV Audit: A Framework for Figuring Out What You Think
In a sea of AI sameness, how do we continue to shape our own opinions?
Before we get into it, I’m doing a live event this Wednesday, March 5 to talk publicly for the first time about my cancer diagnosis last year. Joining me is Erica Wells of MagView, who will share innovations in cancer imaging (since 5 MRIs missed one of my tumors) + practical advice for how to become a self-advocate. RSVP to be notified when we go live, and get the recording.
Just for Fun
The POV Audit: A Framework for Figuring Out What You Think
I was on the AI Ready CMO podcast this week, where Peter Benei asked me how we are using AI as an agency to deliver more for our clients. And I did not gate keep, so listen in if you want to know what we’re doing over at Backroom with AI.
During our talk, I shared my belief that if you don’t have a point of view, AI can’t help you create anything meaningful. It just makes you a middleman between robots. Let’s talk about it.
Everyone’s talking about tools, efficiency, output — how much, how fast, how automated. And I get it, because the pressure to produce is absolutely relentless and has been for as long as most of us have been working.
But if you have no lens through which to look at the world (e.g. opinions, style, taste, a hard-won perspective that you’ve developed through years of actually living and paying attention and sometimes being wrong) then what exactly are you scaling? The answer is nothing. You’re scaling the absence of a thing.
You can’t really put your finger on it when you see it either, it’s similar to that feeling when someone in a meeting says a lot of things, uses the corporate words, but you don’t really know what they….actually said. It’s an undercurrent of disconnection from the whole point because, friends, there isn’t one.
There’s a term that went mainstream in 2021 thanks to psychologist Adam Grant: “languishing.” It described that pandemic feeling of showing up for your life but not actually being present in it. Not depressed, but not flourishing either. Just...kinda existing. Corey Keyes, the sociologist who originally coined it, described it as “the absence of feeling good about your life”, like emptiness and stagnation wrapped in a functional-looking package. You’re fine on paper but slowly dying inside.
And now, almost six years later, I think we’ve made it worse. We’ve given the productivity obsession a turbocharger called AI, and the result is a sea of sameness so vast and so beige that it’s become its own aesthetic category (think millennial greycore decor, now for brands!). Seventy-four percent of newly published web pages now contain AI-generated content. Usage of the term “AI slop” increased ninefold in 2025. Merriam-Webster made “slop” the word of the year. We are drowning in content that is the digital equivalent of a plain flavored oatmeal packet.
You cannot have a point of view if you have no inputs. A point of view isn’t something you manufacture. It’s something that forms through the accumulation of experiences and observations and thoughts that you’ve taken the time to have.
It requires rest, recovery, stillness (basically all the things that don’t feel like “productive work” but are mission critical to creating.
We’re on the era of the beige industrial complex. If you’ve been on the internet in the last five years you’ve seen that that millennial grey-into-sad-beige pipeline where every home, every brand, every Insta feed started to look like the same sterile, inoffensive, algorithm-optimized non-thing. Someone on Urban Dictionary described millennial grey as “the sad depressive hue which many millennials coat their life in” and…yeah. That.
This beige-ification isn’t about color, or aesthetic even. It’s about what happens when an entire generation optimizes for safety instead of expression. When we choose what either won’t offend or we know will be attractive (bc hey, it’s worked for 80,000 other brands) over something real and created from scratch.
This rant article is not an anti-AI argument. I use AI in my personal and professional life. But AI is a tool, and like every tool in human history, it is only as useful as the person wielding it.
Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma, said it directly: as AI commoditizes the act of creation, human taste becomes the ultimate differentiator.
So here’s the question:
When was the last time you had a genuine input? Not content consumption (e.g. scrolling, skimming, passively absorbing the algo stream). I mean a real input.
(If you’re like, oh shit no actually just the doomscrolls. Here are a few I’m reading/watching/listening to this week:
Adam Grant’s 2021 NYT piece on languishing because it’s 4 years old and more relevant than ever
The NPR episode “How AI Slop Is Clogging Your Brain”
The concept of “enshittification” coined by Cory Doctorow: the degradation of internet platforms that prioritize profit over quality.)
Behind the paywall this week:
Everything above is the observation, what’s below is the work.
I built this framework for myself during medical leave when I realized that 12 years of running a brand consultancy had eroded some of my own point of view in the exact ways I’d been diagnosing in my clients. I was so busy helping other people clarify their positioning that I’d stopped interrogating my own.
(this is also the same reason I stopped teaching yoga - when I realized I was going in to teach each week when I hadn’t had my own practice or learned anything new, my well was dry to give)
I created what I’m calling a POV Audit: a structured process for identifying whether you (or your brand) actually have a point of view, or whether you’ve been running on borrowed opinions and industry consensus for so long that you’ve forgotten how you think and feel.
