Most AI Content Is Slop. Here's How to Use It Without Losing Your Voice.

Spend five minutes on LinkedIn and you can spot AI-generated content from across the room. The hollow enthusiasm. The perfectly structured nothing. Five bullet points that somehow say absolutely zero. It all reads like what I imagine the propaganda magazines from 1984 would’ve looked like — technically well-constructed, completely empty of any real human behind it.

Here’s where I land on this, though: I’m not anti-AI content. I’m a backend engineer. I work with AI every day. I think it’s one of the most practical tools we’ve ever had access to. But I’ve found that most people are using it to replace their thinking instead of support it. And that difference matters — especially if you’re a founder or CTO trying to build trust with the people you serve.

The Slop Problem Is Real

Let’s just call it what it is. Most AI-generated content flooding the internet right now is slop. It’s filler. It’s the content equivalent of fast food that looks amazing in the photo and tastes like cardboard.

You’ve seen it. Blog posts that hit every SEO keyword but answer no actual question. LinkedIn posts that open with “In today’s rapidly evolving landscape…” and then proceed to tell you nothing you couldn’t have guessed yourself. Email sequences that feel like they were written by a committee of robots who’ve never had a real conversation with a human being.

The problem isn’t that AI wrote it. The problem is that nobody wrote it. No person sat down and decided what they actually think. No one took a stand. No one brought their experience or their hard-won lessons to the table. They typed a prompt, hit generate, and published whatever came back.

That’s not content creation. That’s content manufacturing. And I think your audience can tell the difference, even if they can’t articulate why.

We Already Accept Assisted Writing — So Where’s the Line?

Here’s something I keep coming back to: we’ve never had a problem with assisted writing. CEOs have speechwriters. Executives have ghostwriters. Founders hire copywriters to turn messy ideas into polished blog posts. Nobody calls that fake. Nobody says, “Well, if you didn’t type every word yourself, your ideas don’t count.”

So why do we treat AI assistance differently?

I think the answer is pretty simple: most people skip the part where they actually have the ideas. A ghostwriter interviews you. They pull out your perspective, your stories, your point of view. Then they craft it. The ideas are yours. The polish is theirs.

With AI, too many people skip the interview. They skip the thinking entirely. They hand over a vague prompt and accept whatever generic output they get back. That’s not AI-assisted writing — that’s AI-replaced writing. And that’s where it falls into uncanny valley territory.

The line isn’t about whether AI touched the content. It’s about whether you are actually in the content. Your perspective. Your experience. Your actual opinion about something.

The Real Test: Does This Have a Point of View?

Every piece of content you put out — blog post, email, proposal — I think it should pass a simple test: does this take a stand? Could someone disagree with it? Does it reflect something I actually believe based on what I’ve built and what I’ve seen?

If the answer is no, it doesn’t really matter whether a human wrote it or AI did. It’s still empty.

The best content I see from technical founders and CTOs is opinionated. It’s someone saying, “Here’s what I’ve seen in 13 years of building backend systems, and here’s what I think about it.” It’s someone willing to say, “I think most people are wrong about this, and here’s why.” That’s what builds trust. That’s what makes someone want to work with you.

AI can’t give you that. AI hasn’t sat through the 2 AM production outage watching database queries fail. AI hasn’t been in the meeting where a client’s CTO made a terrible architectural decision and you had to figure out how to tell them. AI hasn’t built the thing, broken the thing, and rebuilt the thing.

You have. That’s your competitive advantage. Don’t hand it off.

How I Actually Use AI for Content

I’ll be upfront: this post was AI-assisted. And I think that’s a feature, not something to be weird about.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. I started with rough notes — bullet points, half-formed thoughts, the arguments I wanted to make. Things like “most AI content reminds me of 1984 slop” and “we’re fine with ghostwriters, so where’s the uncanny valley with AI?” Those are my points. My perspective. Opinions I’ve formed from years of doing this work.

Then I used AI to help organize those thoughts, build out the structure, and produce a draft I could work with. It handled the scaffolding so I could focus on the substance. I got from messy notes to a readable post faster than I could’ve done alone.

That’s the way I’ve found AI works best for content: as an accelerator for ideas you already have. Not a replacement for having them in the first place.

If you’re a CTO or founder, this is the same principle you’d apply to any tool in your stack. You don’t let your CI/CD pipeline decide what features to build. You don’t let your monitoring tools set your product roadmap. Tools support decisions. They don’t make them.

The Standard Is Honesty, Not Purity

I think the conversation around AI content has gotten a little confused. People are debating whether AI-assisted content is “authentic” — as if the only real content is content where every word was hand-typed with zero help.

That’s never been the standard. The standard, at least for me, has been: is this honest? Does this represent what I actually think? Is there a real person behind it?

If a CTO uses AI to help write a technical post about why they chose a particular architecture — and the reasoning and opinions in that post are genuinely theirs — that’s authentic. The fact that AI helped them say it more clearly or ship it in an hour instead of four doesn’t change that.

What does make content feel hollow is when there’s nobody home. When you read a post and can tell no human had an actual thought about the topic. When every sentence is so generic it could apply to any company, any industry, any situation. When it’s basically lorem ipsum with better grammar.

I’m still learning the best way to balance AI tools with my own voice. I don’t have it perfectly figured out. But I do know this much: have a point. Take a stand. Let AI help you say it well — but make sure there’s a you in there to begin with.

So here’s what I’d leave you with. Next time you sit down to write something — a blog post, an email, a proposal — ask yourself: if I strip away the polished language, is there an actual opinion here? Is there something only I could say because of what I’ve built and what I’ve learned? If the answer is yes, use whatever tools help you say it. If the answer is no, no tool is going to fix that.