Prolific Generic Content

Creating has been the key to making it big online for the last decade. In whatever medium, if you want to be recognized, the top advice is to publish frequently. Platforms promote clickbaity and scroll-stopping content, and the more of it, the better. You can't shut up if you want to be seen.

Now, we're drowning in content that we can't consume, and it's trivial to generate more of it, thanks to GenAI. The tide has turned — being prolific is no longer challenging, at least by quantity.

While re-reading William Zinsser's On Writing Well, a part of the introduction (written in the early 2000s) struck me:

(...) with the arrival of the word processor. Two opposite things happened: good writers got better and bad writers got worse. Good writers welcomed the gift of being able to fuss endlessly with their sentences — pruning and revising and reshaping — without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen. How could such beautiful sentences not be perfect?
(...)
I don’t know what still newer marvels will make writing twice as easy in the next 30 years. But I do know they won’t make writing twice as good.

We're almost 30 years later, and that's what happened. Writing (or rather, generating text) is not twice as easy — it's virtually effortless. Yet, most of the output is not worth reading.

But AI isn't the cause — it only exaggerates it. Generic content is boring, AI-generated or not. Movies based on the same plot get old fast. Open-world games feel like a repainted Far Cry 3. And above all, websites are full of filler content.

Even though I switched to Kagi, most search results are useless articles filled with fluff to boost SEO and lure you in. They sound smart but lack substance. If you want to hear personal opinions, append "reddit" to the query and hope bots didn't write the comments.

The indie scene used to be the opposite (there are so many great original indie games!), but even indie hackers now recommend launching a new startup every week. I'm all for iterating, but I'm not sure if we need this race to spit out half-baked AI-wrapping tools.

I like to imagine this eventually creates more demand for time-consuming creative work. If everyone can generate a book on any topic in one afternoon, perhaps we'll start valuing things AI can't do, like stories based on personal experience.

Then, more creators can keep the FOMO at bay and release their work once they feel it's ready. They can focus on what they like doing instead of what they think others want. It's how you make something authentic and timeless. I doubt this becomes the norm in the reality focused on ad revenue, but it's what I'll be supporting and looking for.