AI-Generated Content is the New Floor

Anyone can make it. Most of it is at least OK. Some of it’s pretty good. A few folks are already sharpening their skills at prompting AIs to generate increasingly high-quality material. But, the core problem with content created by large language model (LLM) outputs is that it’s so cheap, so accessible, so ubiquitous—it’s not merely table stakes; AI content is the new floor.

                               AI-Generated Content is the New Floor

In 2015, I made a very popular video about “10X Content,” i.e. content that was ten times better than anything else on the front page of Google. Moz republished it a few years after I left in their “best of the blog,” category, so I assume it maintained its popularity (despite my questionable hair and mustache). I included a large list of 10X web content: 121 examples to be precise. Most of those are still “better” than something ChatGPT4 or Google Bard could create today. Given a few more years… who knows?

What we can say for certain is this:

If your content isn’t better* than what AI can produce, it’s not worth making.

This wasn’t always the case. In the relatively short history of the web, the minimum bar for content that’s worth creating, publishing, and distributing has only ever gone up. But that history is filled with years of slight, incremental increases and ones with massive, step-function changes, e.g. Google’s launch, the emergence of professional SEOs, the emergence of social networks and the content mills that (briefly) fed them, etc.