How to Currently Stand Out in the AI Content Flood

The internet’s starting to feel a little weird, isn’t it? Basically, everywhere you look, there’s content that kind of sounds right but also kind of doesn’t. Like the tone’s off, the phrasing’s fairly stiff, and the personality just isn’t anywhere to be found, right? Like, yeah, sure, there’s an aesthetic (kind of), but a lot of pictures look the same, like the same style, be it Ghibli-style cartoons or images of people that look a little too perfect. 

It’s like everyone online’s been replaced by the same overly polite robot who’s really proud of their “engagement strategy.” Well, yeah, that’s AI, and at this moment in time, it’s seen as a way to enhance content strategy, customer service, and it’s getting pushed for a lot more than just that.  While yeah, sure, AI was fun at first because it was a wild Sci-Fi novelty thing, it’s now gotten horribly out of control. 

Just think about it, you can’t open LinkedIn without scrolling past five “thoughtful” posts that sound like they were written by someone who’s never actually had a thought (granted, a lot of LinkedIn posts sounded like that before AI), and half the blogs online read like rewrites of each other. Oh, and don’t forget about the weird AI stock videos and stock images. It’s all horribly annoying, and this “AI everything” push is just honestly getting more exhausting, right?

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Everything Just Starts Blending Together

AI content used to be exciting because it was new. But now it’s just everywhere, literally everywhere in the worst way possible! Basically, you’re dealing with articles that say nothing, captions that could belong to any brand, and videos where the people don’t even look real anymore. It’s like the internet’s turning into a soup of sameness. It’s just so eerie, too, like living in an episode of Black Mirror or something. 

And people can feel it. They might not always know what’s wrong, but they can tell when something’s missing. There’s no spark, no emotion, no lived experience, just smooth, polite, “optimised” sentences that sound like they were written by a committee of algorithms. But that’s actually a pretty big problem for small businesses. Again, there’s that push to replace humans, and businesses only seem to care about short-term profit for the time being.

But you have to keep in mind that small businesses thrive on personality. They’re supposed to sound real, grounded, and, well, human. But when every feed, newsletter, video, script, and ad sounds robotic, it’s hard to stand out. Seriosuly, you’re not going to stand out in the slightest.

The Human Touch Shouldn’t Get Replaced

It’s been mentioned already, and yeah, it’s the saddest part too. Businesses are firing their creatives, thinking AI can “handle it.” Well, not just the creative aspect, but that’s definitely one of the major ones (and somehow it’s called entry-level work when it’s clearly not).  But nowadays, the writers, designers, photographers, and editors are being replaced by prompts and plugins. You can pretty much expect that the content does exist, sure, but no one actually wants to read, watch it, well, engage with it because it’s clearly a waste of time.

AI can write quickly, sure. But it can’t understand the subtle things that make a message click. It doesn’t know how to be sarcastic on purpose. It doesn’t know what it’s like to pull an all-nighter getting a launch right or to talk to a customer who’s been with you for years. It doesn’t know your audience, it doesn’t care about it. And your audience craves real emotions, real experience, just realness. 

Seriously, would you waste your time reading what’s obviously AI slop? Would you go to a museum that only had AI-generated art or art made by real people? Do you see the difference?

People are Over Perfect

The funny thing is, for years, everyone tried to make their online presence flawless (this was before AI mind you), you had influencers showing off the perfect life, with the perfect lighting, everyone online was expected to have perfect grammar (and internet arguments would point out bad grammar and mispelling, every newsletter and special media post had to sound perfect. Now? People are tired of it. The more “perfect” the content looks, the less anyone believes it.

Well, sure, perfection expectation is still there to a degree, but there is a growing shift in audiences want messy, human, and relatable. For example, a caption that sounds like an actual person. A photo that looks lived-in, not like it came from a digital showroom. A bit of honesty, too, and yeah, basically, they want brands that sound normal.

So, what’s the message here? Well, stop striving for perfection. Honestly, take advantage of the fact that you’re human, your team is human, and that you’re not relying on AI. Seriously, you can still show your personality without running it through ten levels of corporate approval (or like one of those awful influencer people you see on TikTok). Basically, just talk like a person. 

When you’re making content like social media posts, blog posts, copy, scripts, newsletters, and whatever else, you can even use JustDone in double-checking that your content sounds authentic and human, so there won’t be any misinterpretation that it’s AI-made. 

You Can’t Forget About the Environmental Impact

Alright, so beyond the creative burnout and the fact that people are so sick of slop, there’s another issue that’s getting brought up a lot, but so many people don’t understand the scale of it all: environmental cost.  Every single AI request, image, and video runs on massive data centers that guzzle electricity. 

So, sure, while you might be using a whole bunch of free AI tools, they all come at a cost. So think about it; multiply that by millions of daily users, and suddenly “digital content” isn’t as clean as it sounds. Meanwhile, everyone’s energy bills are already climbing, and it’s only going to get worse. 

Oh, and don’t forget about ethics either, that’s a major one, that and fake news, deepfakes, the job losses, and the fact that it’s getting impossible to tell what’s real (and Sora 2 looks super realistic, which adds to the layer of scariness). Yet somehow, AI is being shoved into every corner of the internet like it’s the next sliced bread.

Just Stand Out by Being Human

So how does a business stand out in all this AI noise? Well, that’s easy, just be more human than everyone else. Share things that only a real person could say. Use words you’d actually use in conversation. Don’t be afraid of imperfection, like a little bit of AI here and there for small things is okay, but just leave it at that, please.