The Feed is Full. Now What?

Spend about ten minutes on LinkedIn and you'll start to feel it.

Something is off. Every post has the same shape: a short punchy line, a line break, rinse and repeat another eight times, and an obligatory insight at the end. Everyone's writing is "real" and "honest" and "genuine." Nobody uses a second sentence when a fragment will do.

It reads fine. But it's also kind of hollowing.

I don't think this snuck up on anyone. AI-generated content has been coming for a while, and the volume dial has been turning steadily in one direction. And don't get me wrong, I use LLMs (big Claude fan here) in my own work for brainstorming, breaking through writer's block, and quick ideation when I need options fast.

As a creative partner, it's hard to argue with. But "creative partner" and "ghostwriter" are not the same job.

The part everyone's skipping.

All the executives sharing LinkedIn posts that sound like every other executive's LinkedIn posts, they don't resonate. Informative, maybe sometimes. Tick the box, absolutely. But it just fills a slot on the content calendar and then disappears.

When people are sitting down and cranking out content with a prompt, a big piece of the puzzle goes missing: we stop thinking about how the person on the other end is a human being who wants to be spoken to as such.

Good storytelling has always been about people. Not product-solves-problem or challenge-solution-outcome. People. What are they actually dealing with? What does their day feel like? Where do they feel stuck, or frustrated, or proud of something they pulled off?

Adequately answering those questions for your audience can't come from a prompt. It requires marketing teams to actually give a damn about the answer.

The content that makes me stop in the feed is the kind that makes me feel seen. Someone speaking directly to the challenges I'm facing, the things I'm already thinking about, the friction I deal with on a weekday afternoon. Not a vague nod to "pain points" or a lengthy line-by-line LinkedIn post.

That's what's getting harder to fake. Competence, AI has covered. Voice is trickier. Actual point of view is trickier still.

A correction is coming.

There's a big argument around whether the AI revolution is a bubble. That argument is one for people much smarter than I.

But for content? My bet is that we're heading toward a correction. Not an AI-is-bad reckoning, but a content quality one. A return to typo-riddled posts, thought-provoking blogs that are messy and unstructured, lo-fi videos where the point — not the production — is the focus.

The content that cuts through the noise is going to be the content that's clearly, verifiably, undeniably human.

Audiences are already getting better at sensing when they're being processed rather than spoken to, and that instinct is only getting sharper.

The companies that empower their teams to actually give a damn and allow them to speak to their audiences as people, not personas, are the ones that will cut through as everything continues to blur together.

When everyone's publishing at the same volume, the question will become who people actually want to read. And right now, as much as we might want to believe it is, that answer can't be found in a simple prompt.