In this op-ed, Richie Kenzie, Australia lead at Bud Communications argues that the brands pumping out AI content have handed the initiative to those willing to invest in the real thing.
There’s an adage from a bygone era I’ve recently thought about. It comes from a time when people used to write letters to each other — what a quaint and labour-intensive thing that seems by today’s standards. Anyway, the writer signs off to their recipient by saying, “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write you a short one”.
Odd sentiment you might think, but personally, I believe where content is concerned we’re very much in the era of the ‘long letter’. Although in a slightly different way.
Technology has now made it very easy for anyone to churn out copy. The emergence of ChatGPT and other GenAI platforms means a loose array of thoughts can be synthesised into something coherent in next to no time — and at zero cost. In the world of media and marketing content, we are now getting proverbial post bags stuffed with long and frankly not very interesting letters.
And that for me is the big issue here. When people are given a shortcut to achieve a task, many are happy to produce something serviceable, even if the end result is banal and near identical to everything else out there. Often this comes down to just being too busy, and in our modern working environment, that’s understandable. Everyone is bloody busy.
But jump on LinkedIn and I guarantee you’ll have barely started your scroll before you encounter the low-effort dross. Research by detection service Pangram, revealed that out of 1,002,627 posts monitored, one in four longform posts on social media is now fully AI-generated. Of all posts flagged as AI-generated, two-thirds came from LinkedIn, while nearly half of X (formerly Twitter) articles reviewed contained AI writing.
We’re seeing this trend play out well beyond the socials too. By the end of 2025, almost nine out of ten companies had deployed AI in at least one business function, a McKinsey study found. But there’s ample evidence everywhere you look that adoption is outpacing coherent planning to harness the technology.
Certainly the editors of many well respected publications we correspond with across APAC have had a gutful. We often get standardised notes before we share an idea, saying: “All AI generated drafts will be rejected” or “We will not publish generic pieces — they just add to the noise”. Damn right too, I say.
And while AI-generated content might be improving, for now it is still relatively easy to tell what has genuinely originated from someone’s grey matter, and what’s a facsimile of existing ideas. There is even a term for it now, ‘AI-isms’, which are overused, predictable words, phrases, and patterns churned out by large language models.
I don’t know about you, but I am sick to the back teeth of constantly being told what something isn’t or what things are not. Equally infuriating is the robotic framing of statements and headings. When AI isn’t given sufficient information, or doesn’t understand a deeper concept, it will dress things up as ‘The Scalability Paradox’. Well, that’s clear as mud then.
Meanwhile, every challenge or issue is a “gap” or something that adds to “fragmentation” or “complexity”. “The part that no one talks about” is invariably A) the part the author is very keen to talk about and B) more than likely the part that everyone has already been talking about for some time.
As someone who once worked in the now near-obsolete role of sub-editor, these days I feel a sense of inner conflict when I spot a spelling mistake yet am relieved to see it.
You may sit back and say ‘so what’? But for anyone not on autopilot, these AI tics can be spotted a mile away and I’m certain I’m not the only one who mentally disqualifies content when I see them en masse. And so long as people use AI without applying due rigour, I think this will remain the case.
The great irony here is that the tools designed to make content creation easier have made really great content rarer than rocking horse shit.
Given brands spend an awful lot of money on marketing content, bucking this trend makes extremely good sense in the current climate. Ideas conveyed with a unique perspective and, heaven forbid, some personality, are what audiences and publishers are crying out for today.
This is not an anti-AI screed by any stretch. At Bud we use it every day, for research and for distilling large quantities of information fast. We are constantly investing in new technologies and systems that can help us cut back the grunt work and keep our teams connected across five JAPAC markets simultaneously — no mean feat.
But content is not grunt work and won’t ever be in my neck of the woods.
We clearly aren’t going back to the ink and quill era of letter writing. But what we all need are more ‘short letters’. Content that has plenty of thought behind it, makes people sound like the humans they are, brings emotion and, above all, is distinctive.
There might finally be some movement at the station on this front. I noted last week that the aforementioned LinkedIn has recently added a button to flag posts that appear overly AI generated. All I’d say is that AI sleuths on the platform will have a rapid onset case of RSI if my experience is anything to go by. But it’s a start.
More importantly though, if your brand is getting further away from the ambition of creating authentic and resonant content, then I advise you to hit the brakes and really think about how you can reverse the trend.
