The Real Reason We're Tired of AI-Generated Content
It's not the AI
My Medium friends can read this story over there as well.
You can spot AI-generated content fairly quickly. Most of the time.
The polished sentences. The AI tone. The lack of a true human personality.
It’s getting better, but we’re not there yet.
The thing is, though, the problem isn’t AI. The problem usually is the writer who treat it like a vending machine. Press a button, get content, publish it.
No thought. No editing. No good prompting. And no ideas.
The “Write Me an Article” Problem
Many people using AI for content still follow the same lazy prompting:
Type a generic prompt like “Write an article about productivity tips”
Copy-paste whatever ChatGPT spits out
Hit publish
Wonder why nobody reads it
Then we tend to blame “the algorithm” or say “AI content doesn’t work.” No. Not really. Bad content doesn’t work (well). It never has. Probably never will. That’s why all great writers who use AI are still great writers. And all bad writers who use AI are still bad writers. AI can’t change that. It can only create more “bad” writers.
AI didn’t make your content boring. We did.
“Good” AI-Assisted Writing
I use AI every single day. Not to “write” but to set the baseline for a new idea. Research (with Perplexity or Gemini), article ideas from my existing article catalog (with Perplexity), outline and first draft (with CHatGPT, Claude, or Gemini), and more.
But I don’t stop there. I could. The article is theoretically done by then. And it is already better than most purely AI-generated content because I used my large story catalog as the base for it.
But it's not good enough.
The Three Things I Don’t Skip
1. Angle
Good writing has a perspective, in my opinion. Unless it’s purely descriptive, like a how-to post or something like that.
Otherwise, angles are important. Writing should take a stance. It says something specific.
“Here are 10 productivity tips” is not an angle. That’s a list. And I’ve done many of those. They rarely work well.
“Why your productivity system is making you less productive” is an angle. Could be very similar to the first post idea, but with a human touch (and some positive clickbait in the headline).
Most AI content fails because the writer never bothered to have an opinion in the first place or set up a unique idea.
2. Personality
AI’s default voice is usually pretty boring. Or let's say conventional. Technically usable, yet relatively forgettable.
Our job is to add the spice to it.
I rewrite a lot of the sentences AI gives me. I add my voice. I inject personality. I make it sound like something I would actually say. Including my usual typos and bad English. It's not my first language after all.
If we’re not doing this, we’re not writing, we’re just pressing buttons.
3. Wit
Good writing has edge. It surprises you. It makes you think “huh, I never thought about it that way.”
AI can actually do that. In some sense. It often comes up with angles I wouldn’t have thought of. The goal is to work these in properly.
AI can’t do this on its own. Most of the time. It’s a pattern-matching machine trained on average internet content. It gives you average output.
Wit comes from us. From our observations. From our ability to spot the irony in something. Or lightly make fun of another thing.
The Real Test
Here’s how we know if we’re using AI well:
If you removed the byline from your article, could someone who knows you tell it’s yours?
If the answer is no, it’s not good enough. Now, this test will fail often, because it’s truly hard to distinguish, sometimes.
But it’s a start.
Also, will people know a human wrote it?
Now, even entirely human-written stuff will sometimes be called “AI-generated.” That’s either a good thing, meaning AI-assisted writing gets better, or a bad thing, meaning human writing gets worse (or more predictable).
In essence, the goal would be to have AI-assisted writing still sound like you. And that’s tough. Still.
Ideally, it should be you with a better and quicker first draft, faster research, and fewer blank-page moments.
Stop Blaming the Tool
People who say “AI is ruining writing” are kind of right but also miss the point. AI isn’t ruining anything (unless we’re really pessimistic about everything in general). Lazy writers are.
The same writers who used to churn out generic listicles basically copy-pasted from other blog posts are now churning out generic AI listicles copied from other AI-generated content.
The tool changed. The lack of effort didn’t.
Meanwhile, good writers are using AI to:
Research faster
Brainstorm angles
Overcome writer’s block
Edit more efficiently
And build on their existing content
And their content still sounds human because they’re actually putting in the work AFTER AI did its work.
The Bottom Line
We’re not tired of AI-generated content. We’re tired of low-effort content that happens to be AI-generated. At least, I am.
If we’re using AI as a shortcut to avoid thinking, our content will suck. If we’re using it as a tool to think better and write faster, our content can be great.
The technology isn’t the problem. Our approach is.
ChatGPT doesn’t write boring articles. We do.
I’ll say it again: Even with AI-assisted writing, there will be good writers and bad writers. AI is not going to change that.
I'm of the opinion (unproven) that AI won't ever match a good human writer; but who knows? I don't use it in my own writing, because I like the act of creative writing and wouldn't delegate that to a machine, even ideas and outlines and such, I'd rather not use AI, it feels too much like cheating.
I've had a look on Chat GPT to see what it can do however. I write poetry, and if you give the AI a specific prompt based on an author or poem it can come out with a poem surprisingly convincing, I even hear that much of the public prefers an AI poem to a human poem, but that is probably because modern poetry is in a fairly bad spot right now (if on the other hand you just tell the machine to come up with a generic 'love poem' for instance you're not going to get anything very good)