AI Made Everything Faster. It Also Made Everything Hollow.

Why has AI made so much brand content feel hollow?

I have spent the past two years watching the content industry transform in real time. The volume of content being produced has increased by an order of magnitude. The cost of producing it has dropped to near zero. The quality of the average piece of content has declined at almost exactly the same rate.

This is not a coincidence.

AI has solved the production problem. You can now generate a blog post, a social media caption, an email sequence, or an advertising campaign in seconds. The capability is remarkable. And the result — when applied without discipline — is a flood of content that is technically competent and humanly empty.

The hollow content problem is real, and it is accelerating. Audiences have developed a sensitivity to AI-generated content that is almost olfactory in its speed — they can smell it before they can explain what is wrong with it. The absence of a genuine point of view. The smoothness that comes from averaging across too many inputs. The way it covers every angle without committing to any position.

Brands that are using AI to produce more content faster are making a mistake that will compound painfully over the next three years. They are optimising for a metric — volume — that is becoming less valuable at exactly the rate they are optimising for it.

What are the brands winning the AI era doing differently?

The brands that will win the AI era are doing something different. They are using AI to think more clearly, not to produce more quickly. They are using it to synthesise research, to identify patterns in audience behaviour, to stress-test arguments. And then they are using human judgment — specific, experienced, culturally fluent human judgment — to produce content that takes a position.

In a world where anyone can produce anything instantly, the scarcest resource is genuine human judgment. That is what brands need to protect.

In a world where anyone can produce anything instantly, the scarcest resource is genuine human judgment. That is what brands need to protect.

The practical implication is a significant editing function. Every piece of AI-assisted content needs to be reviewed not just for accuracy but for authenticity — for the presence of a genuine point of view that belongs to this specific brand in this specific moment for this specific audience.

This editing function is not a cost to be minimised. It is the primary source of value in brand content production. The brands that treat AI as a replacement for editorial judgment will produce more content. The brands that treat AI as a tool for editorial thinking will produce better content.

Better content spreads. More content accumulates.

How does AI change what it takes to be cited as a source?

There is a related opportunity that most brands are missing. AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews — are becoming a primary information discovery channel. These systems cite sources. They quote brands. They recommend solutions.

The brands that will be cited by AI are the brands that have accumulated genuine authority — clear positions, expert content, consistent points of view published over time. The brands that have produced hollow, optimised, AI-generated content will not be cited. They will not exist in the AI layer.

The irony is complete: the brands that used AI to produce more content faster will be invisible to AI. The brands that used human judgment to produce less, better content will be cited constantly.

Is AI a threat to brand authenticity?

The AI era is not a threat to brand authenticity. It is a test of it. And most brands are failing the test by choice.