All Things Haptics: Drowning in Content, Starving for Insight

A special edition of the All Things Haptics Newsletter

Dear Haptics Industry Insider,

For years, the bane of haptics was bad marketing. The tech was as cool and effective as it could be at the time, and marketing teams did a piss poor job at telling the story. Not every company, but often the loudest ones.

Companies promised hyper-real raindrops, simulating grass underfoot and ocean waves. But when it landed in people’s hands, the experience rarely matched the hype. And back then, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. If the tech didn’t live up to the story, it was somehow on you for falling for it.

Then something changed. The internet, social media and influencers. Customers got louder. Reviews spread faster. Finally, companies had to get honest. Now, your judge and jury is the public and they have a megaphone in the form of text, photos and video, along with city-sized followings.

But here we go again.

This time it’s AI-generated “haptics 101” content. Long-winded, generic, copy-paste SEO dribble. Articles that sound like they were written by someone who’s never touched a motor. And they’re flooding the internet.

One study scanned nearly a million new web pages and found over 70% were AI-written. Another flagged almost half of Medium posts as likely machine-generated. And if you’ve tried Googling anything haptics-related lately, you’ve probably seen it. Every sentence sounds like it was designed by committee and tested for maximum mediocrity. It’s an em dash and colon-filled industry buzzword nightmare.

It’s an unwanted throwback to the pop-up ad era. Sure, some people made money and kept their sites alive, but it ruined the experience for everyone else. It was noisy. It was relentless. And eventually, it was impossible to avoid.

This isn’t about hating AI.

AI can be an incredible tool, like a hammer and nail in the analog world. But too often it gets used to churn out content that serves no real purpose except to farm eyeballs. It’s not educational. It’s not useful. It’s not even interesting. And it just buries the work that actually matters.

If you know someone guilty of publishing this kind of AI fluff, feel free to send this their way on behalf of all of us.

This newsletter is a megaphone.

I want to use it to make the good stuff louder.

If you’re building something, write about it. If you’ve published something with real insight, send it in. If you’ve seen work that deserves more eyes on it, pass it along. I’ll boost it. I’ll feature it. I’ll help people find it. It doesn’t matter what part of haptics you’re in. Hardware, research, game design, UX, wearables, surgical tools. If it provides value, it belongs here.

And to those of you already building up the community and sharing real content (yeah, you!), thank you. Let’s keep working together to create content and value that actually matters and scales.

Yours truly,

Ashley Huffman

Founder, All Things Haptics
Co-founder of Haptics Club Podcast
Partnerships at TITAN Haptics
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