The AI Content Optimism Edition
On "slop", non-human readers, and the "Rational Model Advantage".
Noah here. Since ChatGPT launched, I’ve been hearing the same fear expressed over and over, particularly in marketing circles: AI will drown us in low-quality content. The argument goes that AI makes content creation so cheap and easy that we’ll be flooded with mediocre, AI-generated “slop” that pollutes the internet. This creates a vicious cycle where models trained on slop produce even worse content.
Why is this interesting?
I think this logic misses something fundamental. Far from degrading content quality, there’s a good chance AI is poised to spark an influx of high-quality writing on the web.
My thesis is straightforward:
If you have a strong incentive to influence people (which every brand does—along with many other groups and organizations)
And if more people continue to make decisions based on AI outputs (up for debate, but ChatGPT just added one million users in a single hour this week)
Then producing high-quality content becomes essential
These models aren’t dumb. You can argue where they fall on the intelligence spectrum, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say they have, at minimum, an average IQ. Moreover, they’re only getting better. If brands want to influence what AI tells consumers, they will need to create content that models recognize as authoritative and valuable.
Put simply: actions follow money. If slop isn’t effective at influencing people, businesses won’t pursue that approach. (Of course, this isn’t to say that we still won’t see an influx of nefarious actors flooding the web with junk to pick up pennies where they can). Fundamentally, though, I believe this is where doom scenarios about AI content collapse—they ignore the market forces that have always shaped media.
Consumer growth of these platforms isn’t the only market force at play. As AI adoption grows, publishers are moving to harder and harder paywalls, pushing for direct deals with the model providers to access their content. This has and will create a content vacuum—something anyone who has used ChatGPT Deep Research has certainly noticed—where the highest quality writing isn’t necessarily making it into the LLM’s response.
This gap creates an opportunity that savvy organizations will seize. While some will pump out low-quality filler, many will strategically develop high-value, freely accessible content explicitly designed to influence AI systems. This content will likely be longer, more detailed, and wholly separate from the stuff they write for consumers. Speaking to brands, I’ve already heard of a few examples of these new content strategies emerging.
The calculus is simple: If AI continues growing in influence, the content that matters most will be the stuff accessible to the models. Humans will represent just a fraction of the audience directly consuming content. The imperative shifts toward open, high-quality content that AI can index and process widely.
Which brings us to the “Rational Model Advantage.” I believe AI models will function as fundamentally different consumers than humans. People famously make emotional decisions, ignoring rational economic models in favor of satisficing and heuristics. Models, however, detect patterns in quality information.
This distinction transforms marketing. Emotion-driven tactics that are effective with humans may fail with AI intermediaries. Clear, informative, structured content could disproportionately influence what models tell consumers. We already see long-form content and detailed instructions working better with AI than with human readers.
I suspect these models behave more like the theoretical "rational consumer" from economics than actual humans do. The end purchase still comes from a person, but the rules change dramatically when AI sits between brands and customers. (This is all very speculative, and could definitely be wrong, but my current experience leans this direction for sure.)
Following this logic leads to a counterintuitive conclusion: if quality content more effectively influences AI, and AI increasingly influences consumers, then publicly available quality content becomes more valuable, not less.
Economic incentives still drive behavior, but now they’re driving excellence rather than mediocrity. The current wave of “AI slop” merely represents the first reaction to new technology: the low-effort approach that always accompanies innovation.
Market forces and the nature of AI systems will ultimately reward those investing in quality. The future belongs to brands adapting to this shift—producing better, more valuable content, rather than mediocre material.
AI won’t degrade our information ecosystem; it will elevate it by fundamentally realigning the incentives that shape content creation. I strongly suspect the winners in this new landscape won’t be those who can produce the most content, but those who can produce the best. (NB)
This was refreshingly insightful. Thank you!