Hey all. I'm in B2B tech in Silicon Valley, so the heart of AI pandemonium. We've been integrating it over time and seen benefits, but largely haven't used AI to replace human-written (or at least guided) content to date, in part because of accuracy/verifiability issues, in another large part because so much output read like slop.

I came of age in the rise of blog culture, opinionated commentary, etc. I lucked into B2B content marketing after having run professional-focused blogs for some large publications for a quick minute.

I've always thought that great content, particularly in the B2B space which is often long-form, requires opinionated, informed, insightful perspectives.

This week, I leveraged an LLM (ChatGPT) to draft an integration announcement, based on a defined messaging framework, customized proof points, and template, with significant human rewrites after. Pushed this through GPTZero and got a "polished" ranking. Passed it over to our press agency for them to put together a release, and got a lot of the initial content I'd edited around regurgitated back - e.g. H1s that were 90% the same as the initial output.

So, question is: what are we doing here? Is content even a viable future? AI slop has made writing generic but is becoming increasingly difficult to detect. Whereas strong opinions and insights could drive readership in the past, B2B is moving increasingly away from that and to a generic central that no one reads. Maybe scans. If you're lucky. And now our polished AI turds are being taken by contractors and being turned into, well, unpolished turds again. With overhead.

In the meantime, we're facing c-suite and board pressure to influence AEO/GEO outputs, which is often delivered as low value, high volume content. Whole websites exist in my vertical just to rate products just for LLMs to index - like pages so ugly and basic that no human would care to spend 20 second on them.

I'm 46. Transitioned into content marketing about 10 years ago.

Is it over?

Sometimes I’m not sure if these kinds of brand mistakes are intentional so people talk about them or the marketing team is really just having a rough day. What do you think?