In an era defined by algorithmic efficiency and digital acceleration, it is easy to forget that the most transformative ideas often emerge from human encounters that feel anything but optimized.
That truth came into sharp focus when we met Nathalie Nahai, a leading voice in digital psychology whose career defies categorization.
What follows are some of the reflections Nathalie shared with us, alongside the questions that now sit at the heart of our work: How do we maintain authenticity when AI rewrites the rules of communication? How do people and brands cultivate meaningful connections in a saturated digital world? And what does it take to build trust, creativity, and cultural intelligence at a moment when technology promises everything except nuance?
From Local Habits to Global Trends: The Changing Face of Social Content
The conversation naturally began from Nathalie Nahai’s field of expertise: the psychology of online behavior. Technology has a culture of its own, it evolves as new tools and platforms emerge. Increasingly, that culture is shaping not only what people publish but how they write.
What stands out is a growing sameness in digital expression. Does Nathalie also see a flattening of the way people write today, because of AI? Nathalie points to the rise “of long–form posts clearly generated by AI suddenly using all of these emojis and stylistic choices, which previously felt out of place or had never been on LinkedIn. I’m like, what is this? Are we in school? It’s not that there’s anything wrong with emojis. They’re a wonderful way of expressing emotion that isn’t as legible in simple text.” The issue is not the tool itself, but the homogenization it produces.
“There’s clearly something going on with content creation that is making all posts, carousels and stories sound the same. A trend of sorts. And even if you don’t use AI to write your content, you’re not safe from its lingo. With each scroll, you’re internalizing the AI writing patterns.” “So if I’m reading loads of content, which I don’t know is AI, and I read the word delve everywhere, then suddenly delve enters my vernacular. […]Or the long M dash.”
So how do you stand out? “You have to be imperfect,” Nathalie says. “There’s something analogous here to what I’m seeing on LinkedIn or with Generative AI. If you paint an image that is hyper-realistic, where you can see every single pore, and you go up to that image (to look at it) there is nothing left for the imagination to paint in itself.“
Leave space for the imperfect, for the raw human emotion to shine through, for interpretation.
AI and the New Creative Class Vs. Learning Experience
AI is often celebrated for democratizing creativity. People without formal training can now access sophisticated tools in seconds: a (non-) writer can find the right turn of phrase. A (non-) musician can generate melodies and lyrics, and latent talent can surface in ways that were previously out of reach.
Yet Nathalie is also cautious about what may be lost in this acceleration. “When AI is your ‘superpower’ it takes away the pains of the learning process. […] you can’t and don’t develop skills because you can’t get through that block of shame or the painful growth bit where you have to slog away […]“ She explains.
“Struggle,“ she adds, is not incidental, It is essential. “You need that. You need to fail. You need growth. You need to come up against your challenges.” Failure, frustration, and self-confrontation are part of how people develop both competence and identity. “You need to think, oh my God, I’m so s**t at drawing. Will I ever get better? And go through that self-confrontation and discovery. Because if you shortcut the whole thing, the journey, then it is going to undermine our capacity for deeper experiences in life.“ It risks undermining the depth of experience that gives creative work meaning in the first place.
“AI is a great tool in theory, but it can make you lose yourself in the long run.” When it replaces rather than supports the learning process, it can distance people from the very growth that makes creativity transformative.
Building Brand Trust in a Saturated Digital World
Brands of course still need to create content, and fast, often at a pace that outstrips human capacity. Turning to AI for support is increasingly inevitable. We asked Nathalie how brands can balance authenticity and trust while using AI-generated content. Nathalie challenged a core assumption of digital marketing: “what if creating so much content wasn’t really necessary?”
“Is it actually getting us what we need and what we want and what people need and want?“. She asks. She references a UK study where nearly 50% of the young people wished they’d grown up in a time without the internet. That doesn’t signal a rejection of technology but an exhaustion with it’s intensity: “If young people are expressing that much, I don’t know what even know what the word is, like a sense of just, this is just too much. Then it is just not a great experience in our young adulthood, adolescence. And there is something that we need to be taking note of, and I think there is something that will shift.“ That’s something we need to be paying attention to.”
Language, Culture, and Meaning: Why Translation Isn’t Enough
The return to human is something we’ve also been experiencing firsthand at Maka. Brands jump to AI with promises of fast, scalable content created by calculating algorithms. But over time, they jump back and want humans back in the creative process.
Over time, automated systems falter, they tend to become repetitive, boring, imprecise, and blind to nuance. Cultural nuance, in particular remain beyond the reach of large language models which inevitably reflect and reinforce the language and culture they were created in, most often Western ones. There are cultural characteristics, customs, phrases or even just words of every local place that can’t really be translated without feeling them and AI doesn’t know it.
Likewise the Greek word “tsaboukas” (τσαμπουκάς), which you might hear often in Crete over winter when someone heads down from the mountain spoiling for a fight. “These words carry layers of cultural meaning rooted in local identity and social context.” Some terms or ways of using words are directly tied to a local lifestyle or local personality trait. “These are jewels of language, jewels of phrases, ways of thinking, and they’re beauties,” adds Nathalie.
Language, she adds, even shapes cognition. Research shows that these culturally embedded words activate the brain hemispheres differently as well. A German speaker may show more left-hemisphere activity, while an Arabic speaker exhibits more balanced hemispheric interaction.
“Language actively wires the way in which we make sense of the world.” Nathalie says that localization is a non-negotiable “because if, semantically, you’re taking a form of a sentence, and you’re just lifting it and placing it into another, that doesn’t work. And even if you correct for that, there are phrases that do not translate.”
Creating Content That Resonates Across Cultures
There’s nothing quite as good as a stimulating human exchange. The conversation ended with the promise to keep talking. And an inspiring vision of the digital landscape, a world enriched by AI and technological possibility, paradoxically increasingly conscious of the value of human creativity and cultural intelligence because of it.
This perspective shapes how we work every day, whether through human review that brings translations closer to local cultures, or through intercultural workshops that help teams communicate with greater empathy. Our network of linguists across disciplines and regions is not simply a service model, it is our competitive advantage.