Hello friends,
Welcome back to week three of our six-part series on how to think about AI chatbots. In week one, we talked about the big mindset shift: these tools aren’t a better Google, they’re more like thinking partners. In week two, we talked about using your voice (literally) and arguing with your chatbot. We even talked about the benefits of letting a chatbot roast you (thank you to those who sent consoling texts).
So far, the series has been about leaning in. Use these tools more. Talk to them. Push back. Get more from them.
But there’s another side to it. Because as useful as these tools are, they can also make us... a little lazy. And when we get lazy with AI, the results tend to sound like, well, AI.
So this week, we’re talking about what happens when AI does too much. Why copy-paste is almost always a mistake. How to spot AI-generated writing (it’s harder than you think, but we’ll share some pointers). Why the act of writing matters more than just how you sound. And how to keep your voice yours in a world where everyone has access to the same writing assistant.
Let’s get into it.
– Kyser
The Slop Economy
An Ahrefs study of nearly 900,000 new web pages found that 74% contained some AI-generated content. Bot traffic surpassed human traffic on the internet for the first time ever in 2024, according to Imperva’s annual report. And “slop” — the word for low-quality AI-generated content aka blah content — was just named 2025 Word of the Year by Merriam-Webster. A new word, born from a new problem.
For those on LinkedIn, according to a recent analysis by Originality.ai, an estimated 54% of long-form LinkedIn posts are now AI-generated. That’s a 189% increase since ChatGPT launched. If you’ve been scrolling LinkedIn lately and thinking, “Why does everyone suddenly sound the same?” ... there you have it.
We’re swimming in AI-generated content. Most of it isn’t terrible. But most of it isn’t memorable, either. I like to think of it as the written equivalent of elevator music — you rarely notice it, but when you do, dang is it fingernails on a chalkboard.
And that wraps up another edition of AI for the Rest of Us.
Next week, we’re staying in cautionary territory but shifting from how you write to how you think. We’ll talk about why these tools are confidently wrong sometimes, how to spot bad AI advice, and the verification habits that separate savvy users from gullible ones.
Until next time ...
