Last Updated on May 18, 2025 by Nathaniel Tower
Have you noticed that a lot of the content you’ve been consuming lately seems…familiar? Like you’ve seen it all before? If so, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. You’re likely looking at the work of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI-generated content is everywhere now, and sure, a lot of it reads just fine. But when everything starts to sound the same, original content doesn’t just stand out – it matters more than ever.
Most AI Content Doesn’t Say Anything New
Although generative AI tools don’t lift sentences word-for-word from existing content, they don’t exactly create anything new either. They’re just not made to.
See, these types of AI tools are trained on massive datasets made up of human-written books, articles, and websites. When you ask them to write, their job is to simply predict what words should come next based on patterns they’ve learned from the training material.
For example, let’s say you type “the best way to grow a small business is…” into ChatGPT. Since it isn’t capable of original thought, it doesn’t know what the best way is. It doesn’t run through a mental checklist or consider its experience on the subject. Instead, it predicts what likely comes next based on what it learned during training.
AI just rehashes what’s already out there, making its content often sound repetitive, generic, or just plain boring. Therein lies the problem: if AI-generated content isn’t providing anything new or valuable, why should readers bother sticking around?
All it takes is a quick skim to find that they’ve read it all before, and they bounce to find a source that actually provides them with what they need. And as writers, that’s the last thing we want, so it has become increasingly important to make sure our work says something new and stands out in the sea of unoriginal AI-generated content.
That’s where some writers turn to AI detectors. Yes, the writers themselves, not just the editors and clients.
The goal is to check whether they’re adding anything new to the conversation. Because if you’re writing like AI, readers will treat it like AI: something to skim, forget, and move on from.
Real-World Experience Can’t Be Replaced
Now, if you really want your content to stand out as original and valuable in the age of AI, you need to offer something machines can’t: real-world experience. And who doesn’t have some of that lying around?
AI may be able to pull up some familiar, universal experiences from its training data, sure. But you’ve seen things, tried things, and learned things firsthand, giving you a unique perspective that AI just can’t replicate.
It doesn’t have to be anything dramatic. It just has to be rooted in something true, like a mistake you made or an effective strategy you’ve seen in practice.
That’s not to say that people don’t have similar experiences – in fact, some may be all too similar. When you’re writing about a common idea or blending it with insights from other sources, it can be easy to incorporate someone else’s phrasing into your work without realizing it.
It can be tricky to navigate, but the good news is that it’s usually easy to fix. That’s right, with the right tools, even unintentional plagiarism isn’t hard to avoid. A solid plagiarism checker can flag any kind of accidental overlap, so you can be sure your original ideas shine through in your own voice.
After all, regardless of phrasing, not everyone has the same experiences or perspectives. And that’s exactly what makes them so valuable.
People Still Care Who They’re Learning From
It’s not just the experiences themselves that matter. It’s the fact that they came from you.
We’ve already talked about how AI-generated content can come off as bland and generic, but we haven’t hit on one of the biggest downsides of relying on this technology: you can’t really hold AI accountable when it makes mistakes. And if you use AI often, you know that it gets things wrong. A lot.
See, when a human writes something, they’re tied to the information and its consequences. They are accountable for the facts they present, the opinions they share, and the impact their words have on readers. For many of us, that kind of responsibility plays a key role in how we write and how others respond to it.
With AI, on the other hand, there’s no ownership. Not even intent. Just a machine predicting which words or phrases should come next based on the ones before it. It doesn’t know when it’s taking something out of context or offering advice that’s misleading or even flat-out wrong. And it’s not like you can expect a machine to take responsibility for its actions.
This is a big reason why authorship still matters. People want to know there’s a real person behind the words, especially when the stakes are high or the information really matters. Because when no one’s taking ownership, there’s no reason to trust what’s being said, or even if it means anything.
Readers are becoming increasingly aware that anyone can tell ChatGPT to write an article and publish it without a second thought. So, when readers can’t tell there’s a real person behind the words, they’re less likely to stick around.
The Bottom Line
Although it may produce unoriginal content, it’s important to note that AI isn’t a writer’s enemy. It’s a tool, and in the right context, a useful one at that. But if people are just using it to flood the internet with more of the same content, they’re not adding value. They’re adding noise. And in our always-on world, don’t we have enough of that in our lives already?
Original content still matters not because it’s perfect, but because it brings something of value: a real person’s perspective, intention, and accountability. It tells the readers someone thought this through. Someone stood behind it. And in a sea of content that all sounds the same, that can make all the difference.
