It's Your Job To Be Interesting

There will be more content created in 2026 than any one human could consume in a thousand lifetimes.

Depending on what research you listen to, roughly 40-60% of that will be AI-generated slop.

One estimate is that in the next 4 years, 99% of content online will be AI-generated.

AI-generated articles surpassed human-written work for the first time in late 2024

So if you want to stand out? Statistically you can simply do this by writing your own shit.

Although AI writing might improve incrementally, you can bet it will still be technically correct, emotionally vacant beige.

Inoffensive, uninteresting gruel for people to skip whilst perched on their toilet seat having some barely-earned doomscroll time.

There was once a concern amongst people that the amount of content makes their content harder to find - it was ‘tricky to be the signal in the noise’

I think we’ll see this change, as the flood of mediocrity means that good work will be slightly easier to notice (and share), but also it will become more valuable.

What has shifted is the scarcity of ‘evident humanity’ - of work that clearly came from someone who was changed by making it.

AI slop has a tell - not in em dashes, no fluff or ‘it’s not this, it’s that’ language - that’s the stuff that will improve over time with newer models and better use.

But the tell is the stakes - AI slop happens because AI has no skin in the game. It commits to nothing, offends nothing, means nothing - it’s just there. Optimised for not being wrong or out of place, rather than for being interesting.

This tells us that our job is not to outproduce the machines - good luck! It’s to make things that couldn’t have been made (solely) by something that doesn’t care.

I’m always brought back to Maz Farrelly’s talk at Nudgestock last year - it’s your job to be interesting.

Don’t use AI to write about how to balance calories between week days and weekends Don’t use AI to write captions about doing hard things when we don’t want to do them And for the LOVE OF GOD can we PLEASE stop using AI to write ‘emotionally vulnerable’ posts about bereavement, grief, addiction and other inherently human experiences.

It’s getting easier to stand out with your own point of view - it’s also getting easier to take the simple route of getting robots to write everything

You choose.