How we think about AI at MetaMonster

Most people get the role of AI wrong.

They build AI writers, videographers, artists, and musicians. They want AI to do everything for them, to build a totally autonomous system of agents that can just print money (or churn out art).

But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of both the technology and human nature.

AI shouldn’t be used for doing creative, strategic work. That work should still be done by humans.

First, because we’re still far better at creative work. Large Language Models (LLMs - the type of AI most commonly used for generative purposes) work by taking a set of words or tokens, and then trying to guess at the most likely next word. This means that by design, they create the most generic, commonplace version of any content.

That’s fine when they’re being used to summarize or repeat existing information. It’s what makes them great at querying unstructured data (like digging through code samples and blog posts to find the solution to a programming problem).

They can even be useful for getting you over the hurdle of the blank page, taking in your ideas and creating a rough draft that you can then edit into shape. But it almost always still takes a human touch to take that from interesting to compelling.

Maybe that will change as the technology advances. But that brings us to the second problem with this approach. It’s a misunderstanding of human nature.

We find fulfillment and purpose through hard, creative, strategic work (as well as through connection and relationships of course).

Spend some time reading through the subreddit r/FIRE (financial independence, retire early), which is full of people who stop working with the dream of kicking their feet up and taking it easy for the rest of their lives. Or listen to interviews with entrepreneurs who sell their companies.

Almost without fail, they all end up depressed and looking around for purpose. Some find this purpose by building another company, taking up a hobby or art form, or giving their time to nonprofits. None of them find purpose from sitting around watching their bank accounts slowly tick up.

This brings us to our central thesis on AI.

AI is at its best when it’s used to augment humans. It assists them, and takes away their most tedious, repetitive tasks. AI is fantastic at summarizing, rewording, and getting you unstuck. It’s great at doing things over and over again at incredible scale that would grind us into the dirt.

The ideas, their structure, and their creative expression should still come from humans.

But humans can leverage AI to amplify their ideas, accelerate their rough drafts, and to free up their time to do the inherently human work.

We want MetaMonster to be the ultimate SEO assistant for any agency, freelancer, or in-house SEO.

MetaMonster is NOT an SEO-writer.

It is NOT an SEO strategist.

It WILL try to learn your voice and your patterns. It may eventually help you uncover things you’ve missed in your website or data. It may even help to point out patterns or opportunities you haven’t considered.

But it STILL needs you.

MetaMonster is there to take all of your most boring, time-consuming SEO tasks off of your plate. It will do them at scales that would take a human team months of grinding. All with the goal of freeing you up to do the hard, strategic, creative work that really drives results for your business and your clients (and fulfillment for you).

We’re starting with metadata.

We’re starting with 2 small parts of the SEO checklist:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions

We’re starting with page titles and page descriptions because they’re the most straightforward. From all the SEOs we talked to, they are also the most time consuming and painful (read: boring) when you have to fix a lot of them.

These are tasks that need to get done, but they don’t require original thought or ideas. They’re a summary of the content that you’ve already worked so hard to create. They fit into a consistent structure, with clear goals.

MetaMonster can optimize them across sites with hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pages. This is the kind of thing that feels soul sucking to a human. But it’s the perfect job for AI.

So we’re starting here. But we have big plans for what MetaMonster could grow into.

What’s next?

As an SEO, there are so many tedious tasks we can take off of your plate.

• OG Tags
• Structured schema data
• Image alt text
• Internal links
• Tweaking and optimizing headers

We eventually want to get to all of them and more. But we’ll tackle one at a time until we’re sure we’ve built the best tool available to handle that part of the job.

If you want to get access when we’re ready to launch, join our waiting list below. If there’s anything you’d like to see us take off your plate, shoot us a note. I’m andrew@metamonster.ai.