The robot takeover is already here
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a molten-hot topic across industries for a long time, at least since the 1980s. Remember Short Circuit? Blade Runner? The Terminator?! Each major evolution has sent a new shockwave through the collective psyche.
Today’s AI tools, including ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, and others, are no exception. They generate college-level essays, persuasive marketing copy, and convincing long-form AI-generated content in seconds. It’s honestly impressive and useful, and it’s also reshaped how online information is created and consumed.
What began as a productivity tool has grown into something larger, existential even. AI is no longer assisting content creation; in many cases, it’s driving it. So instead of asking a hypothetical question, it’s time to ask a more immediate one: What happens when AI writes most of what we read online?
“ChatGPT, am I training my replacement?”
Most web content writing is loosely based on the five-paragraph essay format we learn in grade school: thesis, supporting argument/evidence #1, supporting argument/evidence #2, supporting argument/evidence #3, conclusion. It’s already so formulaic that people copy ideas off one another without even realizing they are plagiarizing, so why not just let ChatGPT handle it?
We asked ChatGPT directly what would happen if bots wrote everything. The response highlighted risks of flattened quality, limited diversity of thought, erosion of trust, and job displacement. A true-sounding, reasonable, and painfully dull answer that, ironically and predictably, proves the point.
Without culture, content is meaningless
Expanding on ChatGPT’s point about diversity, it’s widely accepted that linguistic evolution primarily happens on the fringes of human society. Over time, new words and expressions work their way into the cultural mainstream through exposure, adoption, and repetition. It’s how we now enjoy words like “razzmatazz,” “gobbledygook,” “offbeat,” and, well, ”blog.”
Human capacity and love for word play and making up new words is borne out of a deep-seated need for connection, a need that machines simply don’t have and can’t replicate. Machines don’t play with language because they don’t need to connect, and they can’t actually originate anything: They can only average outputs infinitely.
Moreover, where do machines get those outputs? They steal them from real, human writers, who work very hard to research and craft coherent, intriguing answers to questions. AI systems remix those inputs into composite responses that closely resemble plagiarism. And even if imitation is the purest form of flattery, content plagiarized by a bot dilutes that flattery (and the essence of the writing itself) with each increasingly derivative generation. Over time, the original work and the truth within it fade into obscurity.
Degenerate content generation and AI misinformation loops
As AI-generated content has become more common and accepted, machines learn from other machine-created material more often than any of us probably wants to know. In that cycle, ideas are reframed, recycled, and repackaged with less and less human oversight. Recent incidents involving AI-generated reading lists and fabricated sources dramatically illustrate just how quickly this process undermines public trust in the absence of human oversight.
As facts lose context, velocity of production and confidence of expression replace nuance and accuracy. It stops mattering whether something is true if it is fast, shareable, and convincing enough to circulate. Because the idea, however harebrained, hallucinated, or half-baked, is part of the discourse now.
This isn’t a new problem, of course. Misinformation is as old as the news itself, but it has grown faster alongside the internet; our brains weren’t really designed to process this much information at once. But AI escalates the issue by removing human accountability from the publishing process and accelerating the spread of false or distorted claims.
What we’re left with is a feedback loop of content that feels credible while drifting further from reality with each iteration.
Real human costs
Automation always brings concerns surrounding job loss, and content writing is no exception. Luckily, since so many writers are contractors and freelancers, they’re accustomed to the cyclic nature of the work and usually have other income streams.
However, if that cycle stays more “famine” than “feast” for too long, well, that’s a lot of brilliant, creative people on unemployment. And we miss out on their valuable insight into universal issues in the process. We lose human experience, perspective, and the lived-in voices shaped by curiosity, doubt, and emotional intelligence.
At the same time, online interaction grows flatter and more hostile. Without these authentic, human voices, meaningful connection grows harder to find. The internet itself grows louder and less satisfying, especially for younger users who already live much of their lives online.
AI & responsible content creation
We’d be foolish, especially as a tech company, to approach this (or any emerging technology) with indignation, clutching our pearls and squealing about a time when the Internet was “soooo much better” (here’s a hint: it’s always been…imperfect, to put it mildly).
AI is still a shiny new thing, though clever adopters have already shown the world both the utility and pitfalls of AI-generated content. Sure, it’s great for outlining or working through writer’s block. But we have to take care not to let it actually steer the whole thing, lest we lose the human touch and critical thinking that breathe life into our content for the people reading it.
Fortunately, AI can’t replace taste, accountability, and responsibility for what’s published. Not to mention, there’s the whole thing where search engines are also adapting. As algorithms adjust to the influx of “AI slop,” they increasingly reward authoritative authorship and genuine care.
In short, content generated solely for scale or speed is unlikely to hold up over time, while substantial, thoughtful pieces created by real experts stand to become even more valuable and enduring.
