There’s a temptation that comes with AI writing tools, and it’s one I see bloggers falling into constantly. It goes something like this: if AI can write one article quickly, why not let it write ten? If it can handle a paragraph, why not entire posts? And if it works for one blog, why not spin up five more?This is where things go wrong.
The problem isn’t that AI can’t write. Modern language models are remarkably capable of producing coherent, grammatically correct prose on almost any topic you can imagine. The problem is that when you lean too heavily on this capability, when you let the ease of generation override your judgment about quality and authenticity, you end up with something that technically qualifies as content but doesn’t actually connect with anyone.Readers can tell. Maybe they can’t articulate exactly what feels off, but they sense it. There’s a certain flatness to over-generated content, a lack of specific detail and lived experience that makes it feel like you’re reading something written by a committee rather than a person. The voice becomes generic. The examples feel Wikipedia-sourced rather than earned through experience. The insights are surface-level because AI, for all its capabilities, doesn’t actually have insights—it has patterns.The best use of AI in blogging treats it as what it actually is: a tool, not a replacement. It’s excellent for getting past the blank page, for organizing your thoughts, for suggesting angles you hadn’t considered. It can help you draft that tricky transition paragraph or find a clearer way to explain something complex. These are legitimate, valuable uses that enhance your writing rather than replace it.But the moment you start thinking of AI as a content factory, as a way to pump out posts without putting in the work of actual thinking and revising, you’ve crossed a line. You’re no longer blogging—you’re manufacturing word products. And people didn’t come to your blog to consume word products. They came because they were looking for perspective, personality, expertise, or just a human voice talking about something they care about.The greed shows up in different ways. Sometimes it’s the blogger who publishes five AI-generated posts a day instead of one thoughtful piece a week. Sometimes it’s the marketer who spins up dozens of nearly identical sites, each churning out generic content optimized for search engines rather than people. Sometimes it’s just someone who’s stopped asking “Is this actually worth reading?” and started asking “Is this good enough to hit publish?”
Here’s what proper AI usage looks like: you write your first draft, maybe with AI helping you structure your thoughts. Then you go back through every paragraph and ask yourself if it sounds like you, if it includes your specific knowledge and experience, if it says something worth saying. You cut the generic bits. You add the examples from your own life or work. You reshape the arguments to reflect what you actually believe, not just what sounds plausible. You make it yours.The goal isn’t to eliminate AI from your process—there’s no virtue in making things harder than they need to be. The goal is to ensure that what you publish feels like it came from a person who cares about the topic and respects their readers’ time. That means being willing to spend your time on it too, not just hitting generate and calling it done.
The internet has enough generic content. It doesn’t need more posts that could have been written by anyone about anything. What it needs, what readers are hungry for, is writing that reflects actual human experience and thought. Writing that takes a position, tells a story, shares something learned through doing rather than through summarizing what others have said.AI can help you create that, but only if you don’t get greedy. Only if you remember that the value isn’t in how much you publish, but in whether anyone is actually glad they read it. The question isn’t “How much content can I generate?” but “What do I actually have to say, and how can I say it clearly?”
When you keep that distinction in mind, AI becomes a genuinely useful tool in your blogging practice. Let it slip, let the ease of generation seduce you into quantity over quality, and you’ll find yourself publishing posts that technically exist but don’t actually matter to anyone. Not even, if you’re honest, to you.