Drowning in a Sea of Tokens
It’s no secret that AI-produced slop is filling up social networks, websites, blogs, job search sites, homework. B2B marketers have completely clogged the internets here and - perhaps because they lack the confidence, or just value the convenience - I see clearly AI-produced “personal” content in Slack groups, newsletters, mailing lists and Discords of all shapes and sizes.
And I get it. The pull is undeniable. The magical autocomplete super tempting. I keep trying to resist; when I’m typing out a post I will have Sonnet critique my work and I have to fight taking the suggestions verbatim. To quote the famous Jim Gaffigan: “Hey, that’s something I’d say!”
But this incredible volume of cheap content - a thing we’ve had since forever but is now exponentially worse - is having a real-world impact:
Digg - yes, that Digg from 2004 - is back in the news. Kevin Rose tried to reboot the site but abandoned it after a couple of months due to AI spam.
‘When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority,’ the blog post about the layoffs states. ‘Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us.’
The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, deployed internal tooling, and worked with external vendors, but it wasn’t enough. For a site that relied on user votes to rank content, an uncontrollable bot problem meant those votes couldn’t be trusted.
‘This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an internet problem,’ Mezzell notes.
Anyone who uses LinkedIn can readily attest to R. Paulo’s experience:
Let me be clear: I love LinkedIn. I always have. And I hope they get their shit together because I’ve gotten plenty of business from it in the past.
I stopped getting so much business from it about two years ago, and I suspect it’s largely because the humans have all left the room [due to the content being primarily AI-generated].
AI-produced content is somehow readily discernable when you read it. It seems to sit in some sort of uncanny valley for text. The structure is all the same, there are common “It’s not this, it’s that”.
“something something, zero something”.
“Here’s something most people don’t know”
“The truth?”
“… genuinely …”
, em dashes abound.
What to do?
I don’t think abandoning AI entirely in communications - as the notbyai folks advocate for - is the right move. I’m firmly in the middle-ground here.
AI models clearly deliver a ton of value in software development and I find it very valuable in helping me gain context and situational awareness. Not all of us have editors and people to critique our work. AI critique - if you guard against sycophancySome tips here.
I find pretending the content is from something (Hey Gemini, this is from Grok, it could be totally fake!) or someone else, and that you need the AI’s help to really dig in, works wonders.
- can really help move your thinking forward. I use AI to review my blog post and critique it: tell me what works, what doesn’t, what to change etc. I’ll ask it for additional examples (which I double-check with reality, of course), help get me unstuck, or improve phrasing.
“Well,” you might say, “if you use AI to produce all your code, why wouldn’t you have it produce all your words too?”
I shouldn’t rely primarily on AI authoring my content. I take the time to write this stuff because I want to know what you think about it, share something I’ve done that is fun, or just vent to the void. Auto-generating the content feels disrespectful of your time.
There’s a reason why a handwritten note feels better than a mass email and an AI generated video presented as authentic - no matter how funny or endearing - doesn’t move people when they learn it was “fake”. Effort is a form of respect, and audiences know when it’s not there. In “The effort heuristic” Kruger et al. discover that effort is a heuristic for quality, and the Cheap Gift Effect tells us that “when gift prices are lower than expected, recipients perceive givers as inconsiderate”.
Not only that, but typing out my thoughts forces me to clarify and re-structure them in my head. I will go do some more research to see if this is a weakly held argument, or a strong one. Sometimes this reflection causes me to change course entirely, and that saves the world one more bit of noise. None of this would I get if I gave an LLM an outline and said “Go make this”.
Authenticity is the Only Currency that Sells
How to stand out in an infinitely crowded, enshittified internet?
I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that authenticity always works. Stand out by taking the time to produce your own content, warts and all. I want to read a document that’s less than robotically perfect. I want to read a document that sounds like you are having a conversation with me, not “Hey dingus, blast out a paragraph here about how authenticity works in marketing”.
What are your beliefs? What are your passions? How does your experience intersect with the problem and your solutions? Why are you different from the average lukewarm take from the internet?
I don’t get that when you launder your content through an LLM. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. It might be the only way to 
connect with other people.