Been in content marketing for about seven years, both in-house and agency side. keep having the same argument, so here it is.

Everyone framed AI content generators as "now we can produce more for less." And technically, that's true. But the thing nobody says out loud is that the value of a blog post was never the words. It was that someone bothered. That a human with actual context sat down, thought about a real reader, and made something that wouldn't exist otherwise.

The second you can generate a thousand of those on demand, the reader can feel it, Google can feel it, and the whole category deflates. We didn't lower the cost of good content. We flooded the zone with competent, weightless nothing. now good content has to fight through a wall of it just to get seen.

And the clients who bought the "more for less" story are now confused why their traffic is flat despite quadrupling output. Because output was never the constraint. Attention was. And you can't generate attention.

The brands still winning are doing the opposite of scale. One genuinely useful thing a month. Original data. A real opinion that could get them yelled at. stuff a machine structurally cannot produce because it requires having actually lived something.

someone in the thread pointed out that Google already stopped indexing pages-their nicer way of saying your page isn't worth it. Another person said that when content creation is no longer a constraint, something else takes its place. Attention always was the constraint, it's just more obvious now.

i work with B2B tech companies, and I strongly believe teams default to volume because they don't have a sharp enough POV to produce something singular and insightful. When you're unclear on who you're talking to and what you need them to believe, more feels "safer." AI just made it cheaper to avoid solving that very problem. The content was always downstream of strategy. Now the gap between them is just more visible.

Not jaded-this matches what I've seen too. Most AI content tools automate the writing step. But the writing was never the bottleneck. The having something to say part was. So automating writing just automates the symptom, not the actual constraint.

What does "worth publishing" even mean now that publishing costs nothing?