I write for a living. Have for years, from hotel rooms in Portugal to a camp chair in New Zealand with spotty Wi-Fi and a stubborn deadline. So when I saw the headline that CMOs are now worried there's too much content out there, thanks to AI, I had to laugh a little. Then I had to think about it.
Here's the problem these marketing chiefs are running into. AI tools can now spit out blog posts, social captions, ad copy, even full video scripts in minutes. What used to take a team of writers a week now takes one person and a prompt. Sounds great, right? Except everyone else has the same tools. So now every brand, every competitor, every random newsletter is flooding the same feeds, the same inboxes, the same search results with content that all starts to sound... the same.
More content. Less attention to go around. That's the math problem nobody solved by making production easier.
I've watched this happen in my own small corner of the internet
I run a site. I write articles like this one. And over the past couple of years, I've tested AI tools myself, because I'm curious that way. What happens if I use this to draft faster? What happens if I let it outline a piece before I rewrite it in my own voice? I wanted to know if it would save me time or just save me from thinking.
The answer, for me, was mixed. It's a decent research assistant. It's a terrible storyteller. It doesn't know what it's like to miss a flight connection in Singapore or haggle over a tuk-tuk fare in Chiang Mai. It can't tell you what fear feels like right before you jump off a cliff into water you're pretty sure is deep enough. It can only guess, based on patterns. And readers can usually tell the difference, even if they can't explain why.
That's the gap these CMOs are suddenly staring at. They can produce ten times the content. But production was never really the bottleneck. Trust was. Attention was. A real voice was.
Why does this matter if you're not running a marketing department?
Because you're on the receiving end of all this content every single day. Your inbox, your feed, your search results are getting noisier, not better. More brands are pumping out more stuff, and a good chunk of it is AI-generated filler trying to game an algorithm rather than tell you something useful.
That should make you more selective, not less. I'd argue it's never been more valuable to find the handful of voices, sites, and people you actually trust, and tune out the rest. Quality didn't get easier to fake. It got easier to spot, once you know what to look for. Real experience leaves fingerprints. Specific details. Actual mistakes. A story that couldn't have happened to anyone else.
I'm almost 70, and one thing I've learned from traveling full-time since 2017 is that shortcuts rarely get you to the interesting places. The side road without the guidebook recommendation is usually where the good story lives. Content is no different. The easy path, generated in thirty seconds, rarely has anything worth remembering in it.
So what do these marketing chiefs do about it?
Some of them are already pulling back, slowing down, asking their teams to produce less but make it count. That's not a bad instinct. I've found the same thing true in my own writing. The posts I'm proudest of aren't the ones I cranked out fastest. They're the ones where something actually happened to me first, and I just had to find the right words for it.
More content was never the goal. Better content, content that means something to one specific reader, still is. AI can help you draft faster. It can't hand you a life worth writing about. That part's still on you, whether you're running a global ad budget or just trying to figure out what to post from a campsite with two bars of signal.
The tools changed. The job didn't.
Source: bestmediainfo.com
Catch up on our earlier post: 7% of Marketers Are Publishing AI Content Nobody Ever Touched
