And by this, I mean online. We are lucky we still have books resting on our shelves to remind us how moving, beautiful, and staggering language can be. I fear a future where they become low-quality electronic screens that write you a custom story in real time according to your preferences and how expensive your subscription to the latest model is…
But when it comes to what we are exposed to in all digital spaces, originality, boldness, and creative statements are becoming endangered species. I’d rather see an imperfect but honest post about somebody’s terrible morning than another soulless, antiseptic, and sterilized, grammatically pristine post about how a parent is proud of their 5-year-old creating their very first agentic workflow…
Navigating the sea of slop is exhausting, especially as somebody whose main work tool is language itself. A bizarre image comes to mind: a crafty woodworker leaning against their bench, using each tool with mastery and precision. One at a time, with patience, intention, and care. But then on the other side, we have Carpenter 3000, capable of harnessing dozens of tools at a time because it has as many arms as the user is willing to pay.
And Carpenter 3000 then carves, and saws, and chisels, and drills, and nails, and polishes relentlessly, and it creates seven different iterations of a dining table in fifteen minutes. And each version of the table becomes more grotesque, more quirky, and impractical every time, almost as if Carpenter 3000 were exhausting all its forms until it reached the platonic definitive table.
AI writing can feel like that sometimes. While we are not past our initial statement, LLMs have already regurgitated several drafts that are just one click away from being published into automated content planners that keep pushing and pushing content hardly anyone other than robots will ever read.
Right as I write this rant, Grammarly has crammed my page with a plague of yellow underlines, prompting me to upgrade so it can reveal to me what I actually want to say… I use it as a spelling assistant because I have sloppy fingers and a natural resistance to correcting my writing (because nine out of ten times I hate what I create as soon as I reread it). Apparently, alliteration, unusual syntax, and sometimes even adjectivation are linguistic sins according to the unyielding disciplinarian this tool has become. It almost looks as if its purpose was to make everything read the same… Oh wait…
And hey, as a linguist, I’m no stranger to the undeniable improvements all of these models have had… recognizing styles and patterns, categorizing grammatical structures with great accuracy (until subordination gets too complex. Got’em!), and drafting useful outlines to overcome blank-page syndrome. Heck, I’m also guilty of expediting a tight deadline or two and heavily ideating with an LLM until I finally land on copy that fits a campaign perfectly… But when the only human input on a piece of text, or media in general, is telling a model the outcome you want to obtain instead of, at the very least, orienting it on how to get there, content suddenly becomes a homogeneous blob of text and ink where no original voices stand out over the rest.
If you are a human (and not a crawler indexing this blog) and have stayed around until this point, you may be thinking I’m just trying to paint a grim picture of how writing and content in general have succumbed to the AI bubble. But I’m actually trying to make the exact opposite point…
I genuinely believe there has not been a better time for creative, defiant, and unapologetically original voices to rise above the thick sea of slop, gain visibility, and lead the content writing landscape by the principle residing at its core: humans resonating with other humans. The sooner brands understand how widely AI fatigue has spread over digital spaces (maybe not LinkedIn yet, but we’ll see…) and start offering rich and fundamentally human content to their audiences again, the greater the leverage they will obtain against competitors deaf to this craving.
So let’s keep doing our thing free from the yoke of AI’s antiseptic tone, and harness these tools wisely to craft better furniture, or else Carpenter 3000 will bury us in a deluge of eccentric shapes until we run out of tokens.
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