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. In the words of Malcolm Muggeridge describing television in the 90s (via the Adam Buxton pod): “the mixture is too rich”.

This 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 think back to when I had to write 500 instagram posts in 2 days and it nearly killed me. Wow. That would be useful. That could save someone (me) a lot of time. And grief. And hand cramp.

I kept scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling. They had a generator for everything. Somewhere between the “Free Acronym Generator” and the “Free Ai Icebreaker Generator" I stopped thinking how useful these could be and started thinking 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?

In my experience, Ai often has a tendency to over deliver (at breakneck speed). Which is great news for anyone with a busy content schedule. Bad news for anyone trying to get a straight answer.

The quest for a more efficient writing tool led me into a veritable jungle of words, where it wasn’t clear whether I, as a human, was welcome.

I’m not naive. I know that content has a not-so-hidden agenda, beyond simply being enjoyed by humans. Blogs, articles and web page writing are strategically used for search. Frequent social media posts mean the algorithm is more likely to favour you.

It’s not wrong per se. But something about it feels off when the content is masquerading as useful, but has actually been created to feed the machine.

SEO-driven articles don’t have to be copy-paste listicles. Social content built for the algorithm doesn’t have to be slop. Even a web page specifically written for AI agents can be well designed and intriguing.

The Copy.ai page I stumbled across seemed, on the surface, to be useful. And some of the tools might be. But its sheer volume and formulaic nature made me question whether anyone had thought about the experience of reading it. Which made me question the quality of the tools it offered up.

Ai makes it easy and quick to create content. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into a better experience.

You can create content quickly - quicker than ever before - and it can fulfil its technical purpose. But when machines build for machines without any consideration for the human experience, there’s an inevitable hollowness.