This post first appeared in Anthony Bullick’s Daily Post column.
LinkedIn is taking action against ‘AI slop’, with the platform reducing the reach of generic, low-value content and even allowing users to flag posts they believe fall into that category.
If you’re using AI to generate copy for your marketing communications activity, including beyond social media, this should serve as a warning shot.
There’s no denying that the technology can save huge amounts of time and help turn an intimidating blank page into something to work with.
However, speed and efficiency are not the same as good communication.
Scroll through LinkedIn for long enough and it’s easy to spot people and company pages increasingly following similar structures and using the same phrases.
It’s not just social media. Journalists are receiving more AI-generated press releases and stakeholders are being sent materials produced by the likes of ChatGPT.
The danger for brands is that AI makes it incredibly easy to create more content while simultaneously making it less memorable and engaging.
Communications should give audiences a reason to listen to you rather than somebody else.
That requires opinions, experiences, examples, expertise, and a little personality. These are difficult to replicate by asking the likes of Copilot and Claude to create articles.
Remember, they are large language models, and simply utilise what is already out there on the internet to respond to your prompt.
Press releases, website copy, award entries, thought leadership, internal communications, and social media posts can all benefit from AI support. But organisations need people to challenge the output, check facts, add context, and make sure the finished piece sounds like the person or brand behind it.
There is also a reputational consideration.
If audiences regularly encounter generic content carrying your name, they may start questioning whether the expertise behind it is genuine. The short-term benefit of quicker production can therefore create a longer-term trust problem.
The explosion in AI-generated communication is leaning towards making genuinely human content more valuable.
Brands do not need to reject AI to achieve that. They need to use it intelligently.
Let technology remove some of the heavy lifting such as analysing reports and industry data or sense-checking the first draft.
The key for organisations will be retaining the critical thinking that humans bring: the experience, judgement, opinion, and personality that make communication worth consuming in the first place.