In a world of Ai, less is more

I was in the middle of researching Ai copywriting software (I know, I know, how very 2025) when it hit me.

There’s just. So. Much. Content in general, but writing in particular. As Malcolm Muggeridge said of TV in the 90s (via the Adam Buxton podcast in 2025): “the mixture is too rich”.

One website, Copy.ai, (and yes it possibly is career suicide to be promoting free copywriting software) provides free Ai writing generators. I had to take a look.

My mouse hovered over their “Free Instagram Post Generator”. I thought back to when I had to write 500 instagram posts in 2 days and it nearly killed me. Wow. That would've been useful. Today that tool could save someone (me) a lot of time. And grief. And hand cramp.

I kept scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling. They’ve had a generator for everything. Somewhere between the “Free Acronym Generator” and the “Free Ai Icebreaker Generator" I started thinking instead about how much time I was wasting instead.

And how utterly insane this whole industry is. Did they use Ai to create a list of all the free Ai generators they could make? I look at their “Free Ai Humanizer” tool page which explains what the tool does: “Takes a piece of Ai written content and makes it more friendly to your human readers.” and I wonder, were any humans involved in this website at all???

(A little bit of research shows that yes, there were some humans involved at some level, and they are now pretty wealthy)

I decided to ask the Humanizer to rewrite its own logline. It quadrupled the number of words. Humanize it would seem, to this Ai, means write more.

I scroll beneath and there’s an entire article about the tool, full of the most easy-to-spot Ai writing tropes, like looonng sentences, groups of three coming out of its ears, a bazillion bullet points, and a step-by-step guide. The word “emotion” appeared 25 times.

There’s so much content here on this one page. Was any of it really written to be read? Or is it all SEO-hacking?

Ai’s default is to over-deliver. Obviously you can prompt it to give you shorter responses, and I’m sure if you pay for better models it will really listen to you.

Anything free is bloated, repetitive, and a bit like junk food. Leaves you feeling depleted of nutrients and brainpower.

At the time of writing I would say that AI currently still needs a lot of wrangling. And it takes up more time and energy training and tweaking the output (and reading the reams of text it comes back with after every question) to create something that feels even just a little bit more real to ‘your human readers’ than just getting an experienced writer - or, indeed, a human with a brain - to do it. For now, at least.