I felt this wobble earlier than I even knew what the hell a ChatGPT was. I had a creeping worry that the issues I constructed my profession on (writing, technique, that means) had been slowly being absorbed right into a black gap of copycat content material.
What you’ve got in entrance of you is an trustworthy try at following the thread, at determining whether or not content material advertising and marketing is being attacked by machines or simply uncovered by them. Greater than that, that is an effort to look at why we’re nonetheless right here and the place, precisely, we’re going.
The Nice Content material Identification Disaster
Content material advertising and marketing is having an identification disaster. If we settle for that this time period was first coined within the mid-90s by John F. Oppedahl, we are able to even name it a late-onset quarter-life disaster.
Earlier than AI grew to become the protagonist, we had been already quietly grappling with one thing. Someplace between the 2012 keyword-stuffing craze and the rise of Web optimization-as-a-growth-channel, we allowed a change to take maintain. We stopped treating content material as communication and let it morph into infrastructure: one thing that’s often adopted by phrases like “construct” and “scale,” one thing to optimize, to fill.
It labored. We obtained our rankings and clicks. A few of us even hit the form of progress curve ripe to be screenshotted, framed, and drooled over by like-minded growth-hacking entrepreneurs on LinkedIn.
However as we self-congratulated and toasted our brilliance, we didn’t notice it got here at a value. We obtained lazy.
The unique discount of content material advertising and marketing (give one thing of worth to the reader, they usually’ll tolerate a bit of promotion on the facet) obtained misplaced in a fog of search intent and CTRs. Which means was not at all a given; it was now optionally available. All we needed to do was worship on the altar of the algorithm gods, they usually’d bless us with attain and riches.
Then, AI entered the chat.
It didn’t do it in a swish, LuPone-esque, stage-left form of means. It barreled by way of with the drive of a bull right into a crimson curtain, trailed by an armory’s value of weapons that we name velocity and scale as an alternative of shields and swords.
AI instruments flooded our browsers sooner than we might scream “ROI!”, promising to supply in minutes what as soon as took us days. Content material is now cheaper, sooner, and extra considerable than ever. It’s additionally flatter, duller, and weightless.
Jessica Riskin, a Stanford historical past professor, hit the nail on the pinnacle when she painted AI-generated work because the “literary equal of fluorescent lighting.” The phrases are there. They even look proper. However they really feel off, like one thing important has been ironed out.
That hasn’t stopped us from adopting the know-how and counting on it like we might a limb. Within the blink of a watch, the query went from “Ought to we use AI?” to “Can we even want people?” And what does that say concerning the state of content material?
Content material Isn’t Being Attacked, It’s Being Uncovered
A few months in the past, I stumbled onto a TikTok that mentioned one thing to the impact of, “AI doesn’t make artwork, it makes content material.” My quick response was to fist bump the air and yell “Sure! Thanks.”
My enthusiasm was short-lived. I sat there, telephone in hand, and thought: If AI makes content material and I additionally make content material, then…what does that make me? If the factor I do is so simply dismissed as soulless and artificial, the place does that depart my work?
That line, the one between content material and artwork, out of the blue felt dangerously near slicing me in half.
The reality is, I didn’t fall in love with content material advertising and marketing, not precisely. I did fall in love with what it let me do: explaining, persuading, evoking.
For lots of us, content material advertising and marketing was the closest factor to getting paid to jot down. Certain, typically that felt like a compromise — but it surely was one I used to be keen to make as a result of content material had that means. Or at the least, it did after we had been allowed to do it effectively. When the individual in cost shared our perception that content material might form concepts and alter minds. Not when the temporary was all scale and funnel, and we had been little greater than mercenaries on the service of metrics.
In 2021, Ryan Legislation wrote an insightful article the place the title properly summarizes this crossroads: “You’re a Content material Marketer, Not a Author.” He wasn’t incorrect then, and he isn’t incorrect now. However I can’t assist however surprise if we’ve been so busy internalizing that distinction, so obsessive about being helpful and strategic, that we’ve deserted the very factor that made us worthwhile to start with.
We’ve slowly allowed the like to erode — one deadline, one temporary, one key phrase at a time.
It’s very tempting to put all of this at AI’s toes, however we must be trustworthy with ourselves: the machines didn’t begin the fireplace. We did. We optimized ourselves right into a nook. We made content material so effectively that we forgot to make it matter. Like literature’s biggest anti-heroes, we grew to become the architects of our personal downfall, and AI is simply mirroring again the system we constructed, solely with higher output velocity and no PTO expectations.
There’s one other quote from Riskin that I hold coming again to. She describes AI-generated work as having no “I” in it, no interiority. She remembers an trade with a pupil who questioned whether or not people aren’t truly just like LLMs, to which Riskin replied “No. Since you’re you in there, pondering and responding. There’s no I in ChatGPT.”
But paradoxically, that “I” is what many entrepreneurs have been taught to suppress. Keep on with model voice, observe the temporary, don’t go rogue, we’re instructed. You possibly can spend years on this {industry} with out ever being requested: What do you assume? What do you care about?
So possibly we shouldn’t be hyperfixating on whether or not AI is making issues worse, however how and why we allowed content material to turn into what it’s earlier than AI was even a variable. If AI is exposing the blandness, the optimization-obsessed vacancy of a lot content material advertising and marketing, possibly that’s a wake-up name we desperately wanted.
If we’re keen to look actually at what’s being uncovered, then we are able to start once more.
What Was At all times Potential (And Nonetheless Is)
Principally, content material has been advantageous. Useful. However was it ever resonant? Was it ever something greater than a thinly veiled gross sales pitch with an extended phrase depend? One thing you bookmarked and cited and located your self desirous about days, months, years later?
A few of it was.
There have all the time been items that stood out and taught you one thing new. Articles that put forth concepts with actual tooth, that felt tougher to jot down and had been virtually all the time dangerous. They usually labored, in a means that outlived Q2 of 2020-whatever.
At Animalz, we name them Blockbuster Blogs. Not as a result of they made hundreds of thousands on the proverbial field workplace, however as a result of they had been as singular as they had been daring. Written by individuals who knew what they had been speaking about and cared sufficient to say it. Who let their incisiveness and creativity cleared the path, and constructed empires on the energy of the concepts they put into phrases.
Ryan Vacation additionally talks about this in his weblog. The titular choice that modified his profession was the selection to cease spending cash on paid adverts completely and make investments all of it in content material as an alternative. From his perspective, promoting was inherently fleeting, whereas content material might generate lasting that means. Ryan solid a legacy of content material that individuals nonetheless come again to 10 years later, and can hold coming again to 10 years from now.
That is the form of content material that lasts, that cuts by way of, that honors the unique discount. Not simply fairly phrases and fiddly metaphors (although I really like me a few of these). Relatively: judgement, exercised with care; perspective, earned over time; and a craft, honed in service of worth.
Maybe that’s what we’re being pushed again in the direction of now. Perhaps the content material that wins on this ever-evolving panorama is the stuff that may’t be generated. That requires danger and interpretation. An “I.”
That doesn’t imply we’ve got to brace ourselves for an epic-level battle of man vs. machine. It might be naive to consider AI will go gently into that goodnight and take all of its nice effectivity features with it.
There’ll all the time be a spot and a objective for quick, scalable content material. However in revealing how empty that may be when it is all we purpose for, AI has created area for one thing higher to exist alongside it.
Resonant, wealthy, intentional content material could make a comeback, not regardless of AI however due to it — as a result of the machines can tackle the meaninglessness. They’ll churn out the filler, the usual, the anticipated. And us? Us people, who’ve been rendered numb by the noise and dulled by the sameness?
We get to make one thing higher. We get to be a part of a renaissance.
It received’t be a loud one. There can be no oil work or papal commissions. Only a quiet return to the concept content material can carry weight.
Let Us Return to Which means
When my editor, Tim, and I had been riffing on concepts for this piece, he known as it a love letter to content material. As I brain-dumped my means by way of a primary draft, as I polished and re-polished, I ended up right here as an alternative.
With an invite, a hope-filled suggestion, that we come dwelling.
That we choose up the place we left off, with the unique discount we so carelessly allowed to collect mud: create one thing of worth for the reader, and in return, earn their belief, consideration, and loyalty.
Sure, AI can assist us. It may possibly — and can — generate. However solely we are able to imply. Solely we (maddeningly, imperfectly, humanly) can set our jaws in defiance and refuse to let our career be flattened into noise.
What comes subsequent, if we’ve got the heart and a spotlight spans to do it, may very well be a physique of labor to be happy with. Not propped up by phrase depend or velocity, however by the that means we insist on making. By the care we convey to a world determined to automate its means out of it.
The industry-wide erosion of that means described right here performs out in particular person workflows too. For a uncooked, private account of how AI dependency can hole out a author’s artistic course of, learn Confessions of an AI Addict: one marketer’s trustworthy reckoning with algorithmic seduction and the battle to reclaim unique pondering.
Mariana Fernandes
Mariana is a Senior Content material Supervisor at Animalz.
