How AI Is Making Us Better Storytellers
The Slop Problem Is Real
Let’s not romanticise this. AI-generated content has a texture that’s recognisable once you’ve seen enough of it. The sentences are technically correct, the structure is logical, and the tone is enthusiastic in a vague, commitmentless way. Nothing offends, but nothing surprises.
The volume is staggering, and marketing teams are publishing ten times the content they did five years ago, at a fraction of the cost. SEO strategies have industrialised the production of articles that exist not to inform or move anyone, but to satisfy an algorithm. Social feeds are clogged with captions that begin “In today’s fast-paced world…” and end with five emojis chosen by a machine that has never felt anything.
Readers feel this, even when they can’t name it. Engagement is falling on content that used to perform, and audiences are becoming instinctively allergic to the generic. The bar for what earns attention has quietly but dramatically risen.
Contrast Is the Forcing Function
Here’s what the slop avalanche has done that nobody planned: it has made the bar for genuine human storytelling startlingly clear.
When a piece of writing carries a real perspective, when it reflects the specific experience of a specific person navigating a specific situation, it stands out with a visibility that would have been impossible five years ago, the contrast effect is powerful. One authentic voice in a feed of generated content gets remembered as well as noticed.
This is the forcing function. Writers and marketers who relied on competent, adequate content are finding that competent and adequate no longer cuts through. The audience has been trained, by sheer volume of exposure, to skip anything that doesn’t feel genuinely human within the first few sentences, and the “skim-and-bounce” has become unconscious and near-instantaneous.
The result is that the only viable creative strategy is to have something real to say, and say it in a way that only you could say it.
What AI Can’t Replicate
AI is extraordinarily good at producing the middle. It can identify patterns in existing content, recombine them fluently, and output something that resembles competent writing. What it cannot do, at least not yet, and arguably not by design, is generate genuine experience.
It hasn’t had a difficult conversation with a client that changed how you think about your entire industry, or made the embarrassing strategic mistake that taught you the thing you now build everything around.
The stories that cut through in an AI-saturated world are almost always rooted in one of these things: a specific personal experience, a genuinely held contrarian view, or a detail so precise and idiosyncratic that it could only have come from someone who was actually there.
These are the raw materials of great storytelling, they have always been. The difference now is that there’s no shortcut to them, because the shortcut lane is gridlocked with content that went nowhere.
The Craft Is Having a Renaissance
Something interesting is happening among writers and communicators who are paying attention. There’s a renewed seriousness about the craft elements that distinguish memorable writing from forgettable writing, voice, structure, rhythm, the specific image that does the work of ten vague adjectives.
Substack has grown dramatically not despite AI, but arguably because of it. People are paying for newsletters written by specific humans with specific obsessions, not because the information is unavailable elsewhere, but because the perspective is irreplaceable. Podcasts built around genuine personality continue to grow audiences while algorithmically generated audio content vanishes into the void.
Long-form content, the essay, the narrative case study, the deeply reported feature, is performing better than it has in years, because it’s one of the hardest things for AI to fake convincingly. Not impossible. But the effort required to produce genuinely good long-form AI content is close to the effort required to produce genuinely good human long-form content. At which point you might as well write it yourself, and make it real.
For Brands, This Is a Strategic Moment
The brands and creators who understand what’s happening here have an unusual opportunity. The commoditisation of content production has simultaneously lowered the cost of entry and raised the bar for impact. That combination rewards those who invest in the thing that can’t be commoditised: genuine point of view.
What does your brand actually believe? Not what it says it believes in the values section of the website, what it has actually demonstrated through the decisions it makes and the stories it tells? What’s the uncomfortable truth about your industry that you’re willing to put your name to?
These aren’t comfortable questions. They require a level of creative and strategic commitment that adequate content never demanded. But the brands asking and answering them honestly are building something that no volume of generated content can compete with, an audience that trusts them, because they’ve been shown something real.
Finals Thoughts
So here is the paradox, resolved: AI is making us better storytellers not by being a brilliant creative partner (though it can be useful in that role), but by flooding the zone with everything storytelling is not.
It has, inadvertently, run the experiment that proves what human communication is actually for. Not the efficient transfer of information, or the optimised production of search-friendly paragraphs, but the moment of recognition when one person’s genuine experience meets another person’s genuine attention and something true passes between them.
AI content can’t manufacture that, which only make its absence more visible. The writers, marketers, and brands who are thriving right now are the ones who took that visibility as instruction. They went back to the specific, the honest, the personal, the risky, and they stopped optimising for adequate and started reaching for memorable.
Want to build a content strategy built around genuine voice and real storytelling? Let’s talk.