believe the answer is Contextually Proactive Creativity. Contextually Proactive Creativity: The ability to create something that a user wants to share with a friend, at the exact moment they would want to share it.
This represents a massive opportunity for AI companies to build smarter competitor apps, fully own the data, and share it within an ecosystem. An AI-first version of these apps would understand what I am curious about, my relationship with my grandmother, what catches my eye, and my friends’ personalities.
Simple example: Last year, I took a photo while hiking. I don’t know that my friend Jean likes hiking, so I never shared it with him. But OpenAI knows that Jean recently became interested in hiking, because he asked ChatGPT about tips. Unless Social AI tells me to share this photo with Jean, it will never be shared.
The deeper value of contextually proactive AI is not efficiency but presence — if the system handles the logistics of sharing and connection, people are freed to be still and focus on what they feel led to create and explore, rather than managing the social overhead of distribution.Don’t wait for me to discover that Jean likes hiking. Prepare the photo for me to share. Don’t expect me to remember a blacked-out night with Ernesto. Tell me to show him the photo at dinner tonight. Don’t wait for me to do an album from my trip to Shanghai. Do it and offer to send it to my family’s group chat.
None of the above requires new content. They require the right context and proactivity. Every social app tries to come up with clever “ice breakers” to kickstart engagement loops. Most of them are terrible because sharing rates are bottlenecked by the value of what is being shared. Asking users to share something of little value, like a QR code to their profile, results in low sharing rates, even if it only takes a single click. On the other hand, when you show something unique and of value to users, they will jump through all kinds of obstacles to share it.
few months ago, a friend and colleague of mine created an entire music album where the lyrics are exclusively my name, “José”. Our entire team sang it for weeks in the office and laughed for hours. This is now a core memory of mine. One that would not exist without AI. Some content could not be imported from the original document. View content ↗ By focusing AI’s creative powers on helping users share little nuggets of life with loved ones, AI players have a chance to create a social app that brings people closer together, and is also extremely viral. Contextually Proactive Creativity can make you a better friend in a way no other social app is doing right now.
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How to build up to Contextually Proactive Creativity It’s far easier to write an essay about this than to pull it off. Here are some of the prerequisites:
- An ingestable personal data layer.
- Different apps in the same ecosystem; An OS; Access to 3rd parties; Know exactly who my friends and I are.
- Reasoning capabilities to interpret this nuanced context extremely well.
- An exceptional app experience
- Great onboarding; Tight sharing loops; Dense networks; Top distribution.
Social app users are unforgiving. They will not prompt
