‘GenAI’ is De-Levelling the Market

Its biggest success has been to amplify the inherent laziness found in wannabe creators, bad actors and boardroom execs

Image: Badly edited by author

This article was originally published on my Substack, Trend Mill.

For most of my writing career (over 8 years), I’ve done bucketloads of editorial work. I’ve ran publications, edited articles from CEOs and “thought leaders” — is that term finally dead yet? — and worked on books from high-flying business execs.

I’ve edited some great, industry-recognized words.

That’s the fun side of the gig.

Recently, and not out of choice, I’ve started to experience an emerging less-fun side of the gig: editing AI-generated sludge.

I’ll get right to it. On the whole, the stuff I’ve seen sucks.

I don’t care what the Twitter X gurus tell you when they try to sell you their AI prompt writing course or what the so-called “prompt engineers” like to kid themselves into thinking, but AI-generated writing is, at best, serviceable. It’s mid-level, vanilla, by-the-book writing, lacking all the emotion, vulnerability, opinion and quirks that make writing such an impactful medium. It’s the fast food of writing; it fills the hole, but you could have made something…