My real fear about AI slop isn't that AI writes badly.
It's that AI makes writing easy enough that we start leaning on it for everything. Then every article, LinkedIn post, landing page, and point of view on a topic starts sounding suspiciously similar.
That sameness creates an echo chamber. And the more the same ideas get repeated, published, cited, and surfaced, the more dominant they become in the information AI has to work with.
That's a problem for anyone with a genuinely different take who can't figure out why nobody seems to be finding it.
AI didn't invent bad writing. It made identical writing incredibly easy to produce.
Give the same models roughly the same prompts and you'll often get roughly the same structure, arguments, language, and conclusions. Multiply that across thousands of companies and creators, and the internet starts filling up with content that technically says something without adding much of anything.
Scroll LinkedIn for five minutes. You already know what I mean.
You've seen enough AI-generated posts to recognize the rhythm before you finish the first paragraph. The same hooks. The same sentence fragments. The same tidy little lessons. The same voice pretending to be hundreds of different people.
And this isn't limited to disposable social content.
In August 2026, Semafor analyzed 310 guest essays from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal using AI-detection tool Pangram. Ten scored above 80% AI-written, while another 40 showed signs of partial AI involvement.
Even some of the biggest opinion pages in the country are starting to blur together.
One of the pieces flagged in that analysis was published under the byline of a university provost and argued against the kind of AI dependence the article itself appeared to demonstrate.
You couldn't write the irony better. Apparently AI could.
I'm not going to tell you to stop using AI.
Let's be real. That's not happening.
I use it. You probably use it. Every company trying to move faster is going to use it.
The tools aren't the problem.
The problem is using them in a way that averages your thinking into everyone else's.
If you give AI nothing distinctive to work with, it has no reason to give you anything distinctive back.
The answer isn't to avoid AI. It's to give it more of you.
Your actual opinions. Your reasoning. Your experience. The things you believe that someone else in your industry might disagree with.
AI should understand how you think, not just what topic you want 1,200 words about.
Feed it your writing. Explain your stance. Give it the context behind why you believe something. Push back when it smooths out the interesting parts. Correct it when it turns a strong position into generic industry advice.
Use AI to sharpen an independent point of view, not manufacture one for you.
In other words: zag when everyone else is zigging.
The problem is that zagging is only step one.
Imagine there are a thousand pieces of content all making roughly the same argument and one article saying something completely different.
If the thousand similar pieces are being linked to, shared, discussed, referenced, and surfaced everywhere while the dissenting article sits untouched, which perspective do you think search engines and AI systems are more likely to encounter and repeat?
Probably not the lonely one.
That's why originality by itself isn't enough.
A point of view needs distribution. It needs links. It needs mentions. It needs shares. It needs people discussing it, challenging it, quoting it, and sending it to someone else.
Otherwise, your brilliant contrarian take is technically on the internet but practically invisible.
So if you're zagging while everyone else is zigging and wondering why you're not getting attention, this may be why.
The hard part isn't only having something different to say.
It's creating enough evidence around that idea that the rest of the internet notices you said it.
That's increasingly important in answer engine optimization, too. When dozens of pages provide essentially the same answer, a distinct, well-supported position gives AI systems a reason to treat a source differently.
But the position has to exist beyond the page itself.
It has to earn attention.
That's where originality stops being a writing exercise and becomes a marketing problem.