I finally figured out why the Stranger Things finale felt so underwhelming. In a recent behind-the-scenes documentary, the Duffer Brothers were shown working with three ChatGPT tabs open. Next to them? Reddit.
Here’s the issue: when you ask the audience what they want — and then train a large language model on exactly what they say they want — the outcome will almost always be mediocre. Not because the tools don’t work, but because people rarely know what they truly want. Steve Jobs understood this perfectly back when Apple was still a rebellious innovator.
Rick Rubin says, “The audience comes last.” David Bowie put it differently but meant the same thing: the moment you start trying to please the audience, you do your worst work. Amen.
Now let’s apply that logic to hospitality.
The industry is already swimming in Reddit-style data: reviews, surveys, WhatsApp messages, chat transcripts, emails, call logs, PMS data, complaint notes. Feed all of that into AI and you get highly accurate semantic models of guest expectations.
Used wisely, this reduces friction. Used blindly, it creates an algorithmic bubble hotel.
An hotel that constantly adapts to the average opinion becomes predictable. And predictable means forgettable. Quiet guests? Quiet hotels. Luxury guests? Sterile luxury. Adventurous guests? Carefully curated “risk,” with every edge softened.
In the years ahead, the real problem won’t be a lack of personalization — it will be the opposite: docile conformity driven by feedback loops.
As in entertainment, hospitality needs a boundary between listening and obeying. Data should inform identity, not dictate it.
Otherwise, the future becomes painfully easy to predict.
Some have called Stranger Things the Twin Peaks of Gen Z. I disagree.
We still talk about Twin Peaks 25 years later because Lynch gave us something we didn’t know we wanted — perhaps didn’t want at all — but deeply needed.
Stranger Things, by contrast, increasingly feels like an AI-generated blurb: familiar, tidy, safe, referential, emotionally legible, instantly digestible.
But would you actually want to sleep in a Stranger Things hotel?
I wouldn’t.
See you next week,
Simone
SIMONE PUORTO
