Why AI-generated content is flooding the internet but human-written articles are becoming premium products | AI Insights | Lumman.ai

There’s a weird irony unfolding online right now.

The internet is being flooded with content—more posts, articles, and “insights” than at any point in history. It’s easier than ever to generate copy, at industrial scale, using AI tools that never tire, never ask for a raise, and never get carpal tunnel.

And yet, as that flood of perfectly grammatical sludge pours in, something strange is happening:

Human writing is getting more valuable.

Not all human writing, mind you. Most of it still sucks. But the stuff that doesn’t? The kind with voice, taste, and actual stakes?

That content is suddenly premium.

Welcome to the era of infinite soup

Let’s call this moment what it is: the age of infinite soup.

Algorithms are now churning out articles that all sound suspiciously like they were written by the same over-caffeinated MBA intern. AI makes content scalable, synopsized, and—let’s be honest—soulless.

It’s not just SEO blogs or LinkedIn posts. You’ll see the same flavorless tone in product descriptions, investor summaries, and news explainers. It’s tidy. It’s correct. It’s absolutely interchangeable.

And when everything starts to sound like everything else, distinctiveness becomes a superpower.

Because here’s what AI doesn’t have—and still struggles to fake:

Lived experience
Opinion with risk baked in
That gut-level intuition that something’s off, or important, or just not said enough

Read a thousand AI-generated articles on the "Future of Work" and they’ll all say the same milquetoast things about hybrid offices, asynchronous communication, and the importance of employee well-being. Now go read Paul Graham’s essay on “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” and suddenly you’re annoyed and inspired at once. That's the difference.

One feels like consulting wallpaper. The other makes you re-evaluate your calendar.

AI didn’t kill content—it killed excuses

Let’s do away with the nostalgia. Most human writing online wasn’t good before AI got here. It was "good enough" marketing filler written by overworked ghostwriters and freelance content mills chasing keywords like digital greyhounds.

All AI did was automate the mediocrity.

The avalanche of same-y listicles and SEO posts wasn’t sacred earth—it was always disposable. What’s disruptive now is just that brands no longer have to hire humans to make it.

Which makes good human writing stand out even more.

Think of what's happened in music. Autotune didn’t destroy real voices. It revealed who was just karaoke and who had something underneath the polish. Billie Eilish doesn’t win Grammys for pitch. She wins for vibe.

Same with writing. AI isn’t the death of originality—it’s the floodlight revealing how little of it there was to begin with.

The difference between sounding human and being human

It’s easy to forget that AI can mimic tone startlingly well.

Give it a few good inputs and it’ll echo journalistic snark or business-case formality with eerie precision. But the mimicry ends where meaning begins.

What AI can’t do—but your audience craves—is write with intent.

Human writing has asymmetry. Someone wants something. They’re trying to prove a point, settle a grudge, defy a cliché. There’s friction between the words and the world.

AI? It just wants to sound correct. It’s a high-achieving intern trying not to get fired.

That distinction is massive. AI can summarize. It can polish. But insight requires missteps. Knowing what not to say. Making a choice.

Every time a founder posts a vulnerable breakdown of their failed startup, or a VC details the anxiety behind a winning bet, or a strategist admits they still don’t know what the hell Web3 will become—that’s real. That’s rapport. That’s memory glue.

Hell, that’s why we remember the Packy McCormicks and the Maria Popovas of the world—not because their grammar sparkles, but because their voice does.

Information has no moat. Perspective does.

One of the most dangerous illusions in business is believing information has standalone value.

It doesn’t anymore. Not when AI can serve up 80% accurate summaries of any topic by the time you’ve finished brushing your teeth.

Want to learn about generative AI? ChatGPT can spoon-feed you 1,000 words in polite corporate PR tone.

Want to understand what it means for your business, your team, or your business model?

That demands interpretation. Pattern recognition. A point of view grounded in something real.

And people are learning this fast. Just look at Substack. No one’s paying $15/month because they crave longer emails. They’re paying for taste. Trust. That sixth-sense when someone can cut through noise and say: this matters. That doesn’t. And here's why.

AI models can't do this—not because they’re dumb, but because they’re indifferent. They’re engineered to synthesize, not to stand for something.

People pay for voices, not summaries.

Infinite content, zero accountability

There’s another elephant in the ecosystem: trust.

AI generates infinite content—but who’s responsible when it’s wrong?

When a human analyst makes a bad call on the market? You can email them. Tweet at them. Drag them on your podcast. There’s skin in the game.

AI doesn’t have skin. Doesn’t have a name. It doesn’t even have the capacity to care that it hallucinated 12 fake citations and recommended you invest in a Ponzi scheme.

That’s why people still gravitate toward experts, even flawed ones. It’s not just about credibility—it’s about accountability. Ironically, we trust fallible humans more than perfect machines because we can see what they risk by being wrong.

Add up all of this—judgment, taste, narrative risk, and follow-through—and you start to see why real human work is now a premium product.

Not because it’s rare.

Because it has cost.

And now, content without insight is a commodity

Let’s go even deeper.

“Informational content” as a category? It's toast.

If your company’s blog is filled with articles like “Top 10 Digital Transformation Trends in 2024,” AI is already doing it better and faster and cheaper. You’re competing with a limitless supply of statistical noise at that point.

But if your content shows real teeth—your company’s actual bets, your reasoning, how you’re thinking differently than your industry peers—that can’t be faked by a model trained on the past.

The whole game is shifting from:

“How well-written is this?”

“Does anyone care what this says?”

Big difference.

Five-year plans are facing the same extinction curve

Planning doesn’t age well in a chaotic world.

The corporate fetish for five-year plans needs a eulogy, not a defense meeting. In a world where a product cycle is shorter than an episode of Succession, and tech platforms can nuke your business model overnight, laminated roadmaps feel laughable at best, fatal at worst.

Netflix didn’t become Netflix by following a meticulously structured DVD plan.

They blew up their own delivery business for streaming. Then blew up streaming for original content. Now they’re tinkering with games and live content.

That’s not strategy-as-orchestra. That’s jazz.

The real winners aren’t forecasting—they’re sensing. They replace the illusion of certainty with the muscle of quick iteration. They test hypotheses every week. Run tiny experiments. Kill irrelevant ideas without ego.

If you're still gathering the troops for a quarterly planning retreat in Tahoe while your competitors are running live experiments on product-market fit every Friday… you're already behind.

So, where does this leave us?

Three takeaways that matter more than ever now:

1. Originality just became your strategic moat

If you’re a founder, a marketing lead, a strategist, or just a really smart person publishing online—don’t try to sound smarter than a machine. You won’t win.

Sound riskier. Weirder. Clearer. Your edge is not polish. It’s personality.

Give your writing heat. Show the scar. Take a position. If everything you post could also be written by ChatGPT, you’ve already lost the audience.

2. Experimentation beats planning (and survives disruption)

If your company’s strength is “clarity of vision” measured in quarterly Gantt charts, stop and reconsider.

If your strength is “we test, adapt, and learn faster than our category,” celebrate that and lean in. The future belongs to organizations with rapid feedback cycles and zero ego about being wrong.

Want a better five-year plan? Build better five-week reflexes.

3. AI raises the floor—but the ceiling is still human

AI makes average content easier to produce. Great content? It only becomes more obvious by contrast.

In this noisy internet, readers are filtering for depth, accountability, and individuality like never before. Quality isn’t just about polish anymore—it’s about:

Is this real?
Does someone stand behind this?
Would I miss this voice if it disappeared?

That’s the new bar.

And ironically, it’s forcing serious creators and companies to bring more skin to the game—not less.

So yeah.

The AI flood is real. But it didn’t kill content.

It just killed apathy.

And in a world of infinite soup, people are paying again—for spice.