Let’s start with a simple truth: the internet is no longer a quiet library. It’s a bustling, shouting marketplace of ideas, where attention is the only currency that matters. In this arena, a new competitor has entered the fray—the prolific, indefatigable AI writer, capable of producing thousands of words with a single prompt.
But here lies the quiet, unspoken problem. Give an AI a topic like “the importance of drinking water” or “why sleep is good for you,” and it will generate a perfectly coherent, grammatically flawless article. It will structure the arguments logically, define key terms, and conclude with a neat summary. And almost no one will care.
Why? Because the AI, in its vast statistical wisdom, is exceptionally good at stating the obvious. It excels at mapping the well-trodden center of any topic, the common knowledge we all share. And that is the precise content that vanishes without a trace in today’s digital landscape.
The Obvious Gets You Nowhere
Think about your own behavior online. What makes you click? What makes you pause, read, and then feel compelled to comment or share? It’s rarely a simple restatement of facts. It’s a surprising angle, a personal story that illuminates a universal truth, a controversial take that challenges your assumptions, or a piece of hard-won expertise you can’t find anywhere else.
An AI, trained on the aggregated, average voice of the internet, is fundamentally designed to produce the consensus view. It delivers the “what” without the “why me, why now.” An article on “time management tips” that lists “make a to-do list” and “avoid distractions” is not just bland; it’s invisible. It has no heartbeat, no friction, no lived experience behind it. It echoes what has already been said a million times, and in doing so, it gives the reader zero reason to engage. There’s nothing to argue with, marvel at, or feel connected to.
The Sea of Sameness
This leads directly to the second issue: if you use AI to write a surface-level article on a common topic, you are almost certainly creating a duplicate. You are adding one more drop to an ocean of identical content. The AI is drawing from the same vast pool of source material as every other user, often arriving at the same logical conclusions and even similar phrasings.Before the first sentence is written, you must assume there are already a hundred—or a thousand—articles out there saying nearly the same thing. Your AI-generated piece doesn’t stand out; it blends in. Search engines, increasingly sophisticated in their mission to serve unique value, have little reason to prioritize it. Readers, encountering the same points presented in the same neutral tone, have no reason to choose yours over another, or to remember it once they click away.
The Human Is the Point
This isn’t a dismissal of AI as a tool. It’s a clarification of its purpose. The true power of AI isn’t to be the writer; it’s to be the world’s fastest, most relentless research assistant, brainstorm partner, and first-draft generator. The magic—the click-driving, engagement-sparking magic—happens in what the human does next.The human is the one who asks, “But what about this weird corner of the topic?” The human inserts the vulnerable anecdote about their own failure to drink enough water, which makes the advice feel real. The human connects sleep science to the strange creative breakthrough they had at 3 AM, offering a perspective no dataset could invent. The human has a voice—cynical, joyful, exhausted, curious—that resonates with a specific audience in a way a machine’s tonal adjustment simply cannot.
Using AI to handle the obvious frees you from the drudgery of writing the foundational paragraphs everyone skips anyway. It allows you to conserve your creative energy for the part that matters: the insight. The twist. The personal connection. The new data. The opinion that might make some people mad. That is the content that rises above the algorithmic sea of sameness.
In the end, the internet doesn’t need more articles that say what we already know. It needs more perspective, more personality, and more pointed thought. The AI can give you the words, but only you can provide the point of view. And in the economy of attention, point of view is the only thing that pays.