When Polished Content Stops Being Interesting

AI has made it incredibly easy to produce polished writing, images, videos and basically anything else a marketing team might need. And at first, this seems like an amazing thing. More creativity, lower costs, faster production. But there is another side to it.

Sometimes I can tell a post was probably written by AI before I even finish the first sentence. It has the same kind of rhythm, the same phrases, the same “Here are 5 lessons I learned…” structure. A few em dashes. And technically, there is nothing wrong with it. t is usually well written. That’s kind of the problem in that there is just so much of it.

Merriam-Webster named “slop” its Word of the Year, referring to the huge amount of low-quality AI-generated content being produced online. And I think “slop” is actually quite a good word for it because the issue isn’t necessarily that every individual piece of AI content is terrible. It’s that there is suddenly an endless amount of it.

You can generate a blog post in seconds. You can make ten different marketing images. You can rewrite the same idea in five different tones.

If every company can have a perfectly written website and beautifully generated images, then those things stop being what makes a company interesting. Because AI can make something sound like it has experience without actually having any. And I think people are getting better at noticing that. Maybe not consciously. You just read it and think…this feels fake.

I think the brands that are going to stand out are probably going to be the ones that let more of the human side show. Not everything needs to be polished. Show the prototype that didn’t work or talk about the weird problem you didn’t expect, or let an employee explain something in their own words.

And I also think strong opinions are going to matter more. AI is very good at making everything sound balanced. It can explain every side of an issue and somehow end up saying almost nothing. Humans aren’t always like that. We have preferences, experiences, biases, weird obsessions, etc. A brand with a genuine point of view is much easier to remember than one that is trying to appeal to everyone.

You can’t build a brand by being the loudest thing on the internet anymore. There is too much noise for that. Maybe you build one by giving people a reason to believe there is a real person on the other side of the screen.