Captivating Captions

I’m bringing captions back (yeurgh).

Now that the slim section of my increasingly slim audience has that JT (not Justin Trudeau but, his majesty, Justin Timberlake) banger in their brains, I’ll make my point.

AI is boring me.

That’s the main bit.

I think a lot of folk feel the same way, and as opinions go, it’s a bit like saying: “isn’t this nice weather we’ve been having…nice?”

We can talk about the creep into naff parody songs, the utterly dire posters for your utterly dire local pub’s next utterly dire event, or the unsettling video ads using AI-generated video (on that, my current targeted one of choice features two army sergeants in a staged podcast, telling me that, with just fifteen minutes of calisthenics a day, I too can look like a perma-tanned, superhuman fridge-freezer).

But one area that seems to have gone under the radar - probably because it often did anyway - is the captions on your posts across Instagram, TikTok, FloobRip (made that last one up to sound on the pulse, worked like a charm). But, as you can hopefully tell by the rambling, raconteur-stylings of this post and by popping sarcastic points in brackets, this is me writing now.

Why am I doing this? It’s taking waaaaaaaay longer than the bizarre little AI-generated ones that your apps can imagineer in an instant. It’s definitely less polished than the cybertone of voice that Claude and ChatGPT would dream up, for just the price of a small koi pond’s worth of water.

But it’s fun. It’s fun for me. If every other element - graphics, imagery, increasingly video - has some kind of pristine polish, why not add some humanity in the way I enjoy, by writing? And it doesn’t take that much longer. If most people are skipping through and just double-tapping that nice shot of the shiny musical instrument I’m promoting, the caption is for the superfans. And I reckon they’d rather read my silliness than something stale and synthetic.

Are there downsides? Yep. I miss longer-form writing, but that’s an uphill battle. And I constantly check myself when using a dash in a sentence - something I always loved to do - as it feels so overused. See.

Time is always an issue, and this is a busy, bustling time for pBone Music. We are shifting around websites, and just set up a new social media channel for UK educators. We’ve got some big events coming up, including lots of filming and content capture. When you’re a one-man-band marketer, taking a little longer on something as simple as a few paragraphs about a recent concert or a new product offer may seem fruitless.

But it’s fun. And making things - music, videos, graphics, bad puns about trumpets - is supposed to be fun. Will I inevitably use AI in my future work? Of course I will, even when I don’t really want to, as those tech tendrils creep all over the software, plugins and devices we use. But in areas where you want your personality to show, why waste an opportunity and make yourself sound like everybody else?

On that. I reckon if you read past the first line, the way I spelt “yeah” is what hooked you. It was unpredictable, it was searingly honest and raw, it was, well, it was genius, wasn’t it? You could overdo this trick - see food influencers deliberately mispronouncing ingredients in recipes - but those restless scrolling thumbs might stop in their tracks at something that sounds like you, instead of something that looks lethargic.

I have zero evidence to back this all up, but as I experiment with doing, you know, the job, as opposed to feeding everything mindlessly into a copy-canning machine, we might see some upturns in SEO. At the very least, on those new education channels, I wager someone would appreciate a real person with a real voice spending five minutes of energy, over someone wasting five reservoirs of water to splutter out some soulless slop. I would research it, but Google’s AI search would undo all that good work with one stat check.

If you’ve got this far, well done to you. If you’d prefer the AI summary, that’s ok. You’re just not as good a person as the rest of us.

If you’d like, I could suggest some more tips for humanising your content. Just say the word and, for just a little bit of freshwater, I’ll give you some more LinkedIn fodder.