The rise and fall of ‘AI slop’
There's more content than ever and increasingly, more of it feels exactly the same.
Clean, structured, polished and completely empty. It’s written in American English and full of em dashes! Welcome to the era of AI generated content at scale, where the volume has gone up and the soul has quietly left the building.
The problem isn't AI. It's how it's being used.
Let's be clear: AI can be a genuinely useful tool. It can speed up research, help structure thinking, draft first passes and take some of the grunt work out of content production. Used well, it frees up time and mental energy for the thinking that actually matters.
But right now, it's largely being used to produce more, faster, with less thought behind it. To fill content calendars. To generate captions, articles and newsletters that technically say something, but don't really mean anything.
The result is content that is correct in structure but flat in substance and lacks the personality that makes you, you.
Sameness is the new noise
There’s a the structural problem with AI-generated content at scale: it converges.
Because these tools are trained on existing content, they naturally produce output that resembles what already exists. Similar phrasing, similar structures, similar takes on similar topics. It's not plagiarism, it's averaging. And averaged content, by definition, doesn't stand out.
Where social media feeds were once noisy because there was too much happening, they're now becoming noisy in a different way. Everything looks vaguely professional. Everything is clearly structured. Everything hits the same beats. It's harder to find a genuinely distinct voice because the floor has been raised while the ceiling has stayed exactly where it was.
Volume is replacing perspective
The temptation is completely understandable. If you can produce ten times the content in the same time, why wouldn't you? More posts, more articles, more touch points, it seems like a straightforward win.
But without a strong point of view, more content just means more noise. It's the marketing equivalent of turning up the volume on a song you don't particularly like. Louder isn't better, i's just louder.
The brands and creators cutting through right now aren't the ones producing the most. They're the ones with the clearest perspective - who have something to actually say, and say it in a way that feels distinctly human.
The real risk
The risk isn't that AI replaces content creation entirely, it’s far more subtle than that.
The risk is that it lowers the baseline so far that anything generic becomes invisible. When everything is polished and structured and vaguely competent, the bar for actually being noticed rises sharply. Generic content doesn't just underperform: it actively damages brand perception, because it signals that no one really thought about it.
The advantage is no longer access to tools, where everyone has access to the pretty much the same tools. The advantage is taste, judgement and perspective. Knowing what's worth saying. Knowing how to say it in a way that sounds like a human being with opinions, rather than an algorithm trying to approximate one.
AI can generate, but it can't decide what's worth saying.
That part is still very much a human job.
