By Addy Rossi
Artificial Intelligence has ears, but it lacks the God within.
Plato had a theory about creation or creativity that AI enthusiasts should read very carefully today. In the Ion and the Phaedrus, he describes what he calls Entheos: having a God within.
The poet doesn’t create through technique or calculation. He is possessed. That’s why he can’t explain what he does: he doesn’t do it; something that transcends him does. Divine mania—delirium—says Plato, is superior to ordinary sanity. There are forms of knowledge that don’t pass through strict rational control, and yet they produce the most valuable and disruptive things we know.
The French philosopher Michaël Foessel takes up this intuition in contemporary terms. He warns that AI will replace what we have made replaceable (calculation, optimization, repetitive processes), but not genuine creativity, unpredictability, the ability to think outside the box. There is something about human intelligence that no algorithm can anticipate, simply because no algorithm can step outside itself.
Faced with the recurring question of whether AI can replace the essence of being human or eliminate all jobs, Foessel responds: “I’m not sure there is such a thing as ‘human nature,’ and therefore, I don’t think AI can modify it. We don’t know precisely what human intelligence is, which has a dimension of creativity and unpredictability, as every great scientific discovery demonstrates, so we are still far from being able to make it artificial.”
Up to this point, I completely agree. But I feel that in the world of agricultural journalism, the general argument is pointing in the wrong direction.
The strategic problem for the media today is not that AI cannot listen. It’s that it listens too well.
The trap of hyper-listening
The most advanced Narrative Intelligence tools no longer track static “keywords.” They analyze graphs of entire communities. They detect how narratives form and mutate before they become visible to the general public. They read irony, sarcasm, and nuances of tone. They process video and images with a precision that, just two years ago, was science fiction. They map who is speaking, to whom, from where, and with what exact emotional charge.
That’s not a limitation. It’s an extraordinary ability. And yet, in newsrooms, it’s not enough.
Because knowing that a narrative is emerging, that the tone of a community is radically changing, or that there’s a latent tension that hasn’t yet exploded in the media, is information. It’s immensely valuable, urgent, and actionable information. But turning that information into a strategic decision is a leap of a completely different nature.
The strategist’s Entheos
Making the right decision requires understanding the political context of a sector. It requires weighing the accumulated history of a brand. It demands the subtlety to differentiate between a “weak signal” that truly foreshadows a reputational crisis and one that will simply dissipate on its own within 24 hours. It involves knowing with pinpoint accuracy what a specific audience can tolerate and what it would never forgive.
That knowledge isn’t in the data. It isn’t on the dashboard.
It lies in something closer to what Plato described: a form of knowledge built through harsh friction with reality. In years of decisions made under pressure with incomplete information. In serious mistakes that left their mark and in crises that taught lessons impossible to quantify.
It’s not irrationality. It’s a kind of “reason” that only lived experience produces and that no training based on past data can replicate. It is, if you will, the strategist’s Entheos.
The intersection where the miracle occurs
Artificial Intelligence is the best listening system that has ever existed in the history of humankind. But listening is not interpreting. And the final interpretation—the one that transforms scattered signals into decisions that protect an organization’s margins and future—remains irreducibly human.
As journalists, we must work precisely at that point of intersection: deploying world-class information technology and combining it with narrative senior expertise, which makes it unique.
Because the most powerful tool in the world is utterly useless if you don’t know what to ask it. And even less so if you don’t know what to do with its answers.