Category Archives: Uncategorized

How “Humans in the Loop” Kills Companies

What happens when you and all your competitors adopt a “humans in the loop” methodology for your marketing and your product marketing?

Quotes from Robert Rose, Content Marketing Institute.

“Generative AI promised to relieve humans of the tedious, mechanical work — freeing them to be more strategic, more creative, more human.

“The reality? We’ve wrapped our rationalizations around this new concept called “humans in the loop.”

“This often means marketers are demoted to glorified spellcheckers and fact-checkers for machine output. Not creators. Not strategists. Just custodians of content they never had a hand in shaping.

Perhaps Rose’s thoughts are wishful thinking on the part of carbon-based marketers.

But if the “humans in the loop” thought persists…isn’t everyone using the same undifferentiated loop? When everyone yells “we use AI,” no one is differentiated. And no, it makes no difference with AI flavor of the week you’re using, since they all train on data. Human data.

And if the humans at all the companies are imprisoned by their identical loops…who has the competitive advantage? No one.

Except for those that use humans…especially humans who have been around for a while and remember this. If you don’t have a full five minutes, skip right to the three-minute mark.

Examining Voter ID From an IAL3 Lens

My recent Substack post explains what Identity Assurance Level 3 (IAL3) is, and re-examines my doubts about the effectiveness of so-called “voter ID” laws. Because if voter ID proponents REALLY wanted to guarantee that voters are eligible, they would have to do a LOT more. Security theater is not security. But what is the cost of true security?

“Examining Voter ID From an IAL3 Lens” on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnebredehoft/p/examining-voter-id-from-an-ial3-lens

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Why Do We Trust SMS?

I hate to use the overused t word (trust), but in this case it’s justified.

“Scammers are aware that people are more likely to open and read a text message rather than an email  The open rates for text messages are more than 90% while the open rates for emails is less than 30%.  In addition, many email providers have filters that are able to identify and filter out phishing emails while the filtering capabilities on text messages is much less.  Additionally, people tend to trust text messages more than emails.  Text message also may prompt a quick response before the targeted victim can critically consider the legitimacy of the text message.”

From Scamicide, https://scamicide.com/2025/09/18/scam-of-the-day-september-19-2025-treasury-refund-text-smishing-scam/

What I can’t figure out is WHY text messages have such a high level of t[REDACTED]. Does SMS feel more personal?