Everyone's blaming AI for boring content. But has AI just exacerbated and amplified a problem that was already there?

Chapter 1 of our book The Beige Code opens by considering the advice people keep giving people on here in the post-AI world: be more human, be authentic, use your own voice.

Lovely advice. If it worked, we wouldn't be drowning in beige, soulless content on here.

When someone opens a blank chat window and prompts AI to write their Linkedin post, the AI doesn't decide what angle to take, what to leave out, what's worth saying, what angle resonates etc...That's the writer's job.

And if the writer doesn't bother, or defaults to the safe, the expected, the industry-approved framing, the AI will faithfully produce exactly that, just faster and with better grammar that the person would have done themselves.

Blaming AI for beige content is a bit like blaming a photocopier for a bad memo. That's kind of a shit analogy, but you get my drift.

The 'be more human' advice sends people in the wrong direction.

They adjust their tone, add a personal anecdote, drop the corporate vocabulary and the content they create is still forgettable, because the underlying judgement about what was worth saying in the first place was always missing.

AI just amplified the empty space their post was orbiting in the first place.

The real differentiator in good and bad content is *what you decide* to say, not your em-dash usage.

Over the next few weeks I'm working through all the reasons professional content is often so beige and why AI has made this worse (but doesn't have to), ahead of the launch of our first non-fiction business book, The Beige Code on 2 June.

Follow me if that's of interest, ignore me if it isn't.