About AI-generated Content

Is anyone else tired of the barrage of AI-generated content passed off as human-written articles? This is where an individual attempts to demonstrate expertise in an area but has limited ability to express this through the written medium - or possibly any medium. Usually, this is due to low writing skills or not having an adequate handle of the subject matter in the first place.

It can’t have been more than a few short days in February 2023 where it was a novel thing to post GPT-generated articles that said something like “Look at this! A bot has done this!” Then, it quickly became boring.

In AI terms, 2025 compared to 2023 is like a light year. If posting generated content that is easy to spot caused mass eye rolls then, why now is this practice not only still rife, but actually increasing in the sectors we work in? By now, all of us have used GPTs for our own little experiments and needs and some of us integrate it into aspects of our work. This means that we are all very familiar with the style, the sentence structure, the presentation that is typical of generated text.

For those of us who are Information Design professionals, we have, by default, a laser focus on stylistics and text analysis. We can spot generated text immediately. If a person really must insist on passing off generated text as their own, then, they should at least change the phrasing, the layout and the presentation.  They are not being clever. They are not doing some kind of neat ‘life hack’. It cheapens whatever expertise they do have. I always wonder: Do they really think that we believe they burnt the midnight oil writing these articles or gave up a Saturday to translate a spark of an idea into coherent strings of words? Do they think that we do not know?

A tool like Chat-GPT is incredible with uncountable advantages. Beyond this tool, I have embraced other AI in many aspects of my work and personal life, and I am not suggesting that the use of Chat-GPT is wrong. For example, it is useful for planning any written content, to provide the scaffolding of order of ideas and many other benefits. Just don’t use it to generate the entirety of your content.

This inundation of fake, generated content is received with the same collective sigh as the articles that have been blindly forwarded and applauded the empty ‘likes’, where it is clear that neither the ‘forwarder’ or the ‘liker’ has not read beyond the title. The net effect of this is decibels of useless, visual noise.

Let’s hope that this practice burns itself out soon. It convinces nobody.

Therefore, we communicate because we strongly dislike AI-generated content.