For The Love of Content (or, A Marketer’s Musings on the Tug-of-War Between Meaning and Machinery)

I felt this wobble before I even knew what the hell a ChatGPT was. I had a creeping fear that the things I built my career on (writing, strategy, meaning) were slowly being absorbed into a black hole of copycat content.

What you have in front of you is an honest attempt at following the thread, at figuring out whether content marketing is being attacked by machines or just exposed by them. More than that, this is an effort to examine why we’re still here and where, exactly, we are going.

The Great Content Identity Crisis

Content marketing is having an identity crisis. If we accept that this term was first coined in the mid-90s by John F. Oppedahl, we can even call it a late-onset quarter-life crisis.

Before AI became the protagonist, we were already quietly grappling with something. Somewhere between the 2012 keyword-stuffing craze and the rise of SEO-as-a-growth-channel, we allowed a change to take hold. We stopped treating content as communication and let it morph into infrastructure: something that’s usually followed by words like “build” and “scale,” something to optimize, to fill.

It worked. We got our rankings and clicks. Some of us even hit the kind of growth curve ripe to be screenshotted, framed, and drooled over by like-minded growth-hacking marketers on LinkedIn.

But as we self-congratulated and toasted our brilliance, we didn’t realize it came at a cost. We got lazy.

The original bargain of content marketing (give something of value to the reader, and they’ll tolerate a little promotion on the side) got lost in a fog of search intent and CTRs. Meaning was by no means a given; it was now optional. All we had to do was worship at the altar of the algorithm gods, and they’d bless us with reach and riches.

Then, AI entered the chat.

It didn’t do it in a graceful, LuPone-esque, stage-left kind of way. It barreled through with the force of a bull into a red curtain, trailed by an armory’s worth of weapons that we call speed and scale instead of shields and swords.

AI tools flooded our browsers faster than we could scream “ROI!”, promising to produce in minutes what once took us days. Content is now cheaper, faster, and more abundant than ever. It’s also flatter, duller, and weightless.

Jessica Riskin, a Stanford history professor, hit the nail on the head when she painted AI-generated work as the “literary equivalent of fluorescent lighting.” The words are there. They even look right. But they feel off, like something essential has been ironed out.

That hasn’t stopped us from adopting the technology and relying on it like we would a limb. In the blink of an eye, the question went from “Should we use AI?” to “Do we even need humans?”
And what does that say about the state of content?

Content Isn’t Being Attacked, It’s Being Exposed

A couple of months ago, I stumbled onto a TikTok that said something to the effect of, “AI doesn’t make art, it makes content.” My immediate reaction was to fist bump the air and yell “Yes! Thank you.”

My enthusiasm was short-lived. I sat there, phone in hand, and thought: If AI makes content and I also make content, then…what does that make me? If the thing I do is so easily dismissed as soulless and synthetic, where does that leave my work?

That line, the one between content and art, suddenly felt dangerously close to slicing me in half.

The truth is, I didn’t fall in love with content marketing, not exactly. I did fall in love with what it let me do: explaining, persuading, evoking.

For a lot of us, content marketing was the closest thing to getting paid to write. Sure, sometimes that felt like a compromise — but it was one I was willing to make because content had meaning. Or at least, it did when we were allowed to do it well. When the person in charge shared our belief that content could shape ideas and change minds. Not when the brief was all scale and funnel, and we were little more than mercenaries at the service of metrics.

In 2021, Ryan Law wrote an insightful article where the title nicely summarizes this crossroads: “You’re a Content Marketer, Not a Writer.” He wasn’t wrong then, and he isn’t wrong now. But I can’t help but wonder if we’ve been so busy internalizing that distinction, so obsessed with being useful and strategic, that we’ve abandoned the very thing that made us valuable to begin with.

We’ve slowly allowed the love to erode — one deadline, one brief, one keyword at a time.

It’s very tempting to lay all of this at AI’s feet, but we need to be honest with ourselves: the machines didn’t start the fire. We did. We optimized ourselves into a corner. We made content so efficiently that we forgot to make it matter. Like literature’s greatest anti-heroes, we became the architects of our own downfall, and AI is just mirroring back the system we built, only with better output speed and no PTO expectations.

There’s another quote from Riskin that I keep coming back to. She describes AI-generated work as having no “I” in it, no interiority. She recalls an exchange with a student who questioned whether humans aren’t actually similar to LLMs, to which Riskin replied “No. Because you’re you in there, thinking and responding. There’s no I in ChatGPT.”

Yet ironically, that “I” is what many marketers have been taught to suppress. Stick to brand voice, follow the brief, don’t go rogue, we’re told. You can spend years in this industry without ever being asked: What do you think? What do you care about?

So maybe we shouldn’t be hyperfixating on whether AI is making things worse, but how and why we allowed content to become what it is before AI was even a variable. If AI is exposing the blandness, the optimization-obsessed emptiness of so much content marketing, maybe that’s a wake-up call we desperately needed.

If we’re willing to look honestly at what’s being exposed, then we can begin again.

What Was Always Possible (And Still Is)

Mostly, content has been fine. Functional. But was it ever resonant? Was it ever anything more than a thinly veiled sales pitch with a longer word count? Something you bookmarked and cited and found yourself thinking about days, months, years later?

Some of it was.

There have always been pieces that stood out and taught you something new. Articles that put forth ideas with real teeth, that felt harder to write and were almost always risky. And they worked, in a way that outlived Q2 of 2020-whatever.

At Animalz, we call them Blockbuster Blogs. Not because they made millions at the proverbial box office, but because they were as singular as they were bold. Written by people who knew what they were talking about and cared enough to say it. Who let their incisiveness and creativity lead the way, and built empires on the strength of the ideas they put into words.

Ryan Holiday also talks about this in his blog. The titular decision that changed his career was the choice to stop spending money on paid ads entirely and invest it all in content instead. From his point of view, advertising was inherently fleeting, while content could generate lasting meaning. Ryan forged a legacy of content that people still come back to ten years later, and will keep coming back to ten years from now.

This is the kind of content that lasts, that cuts through, that honors the original bargain. Not just pretty words and fiddly metaphors (though I love me some of those). Rather: judgement, exercised with care; perspective, earned over time; and a craft, honed in service of value.

Perhaps that’s what we’re being pushed back towards now. Maybe the content that wins in this ever-evolving landscape is the stuff that can’t be generated. That requires risk and interpretation. An “I.”

That doesn’t mean we have to brace ourselves for an epic-level battle of man vs. machine. It would be naive to believe AI will go gently into that goodnight and take all of its great efficiency gains with it.

There will always be a place and a purpose for fast, scalable content. But in revealing how empty that can be when it's all we aim for, AI has created space for something better to exist alongside it.

Resonant, rich, intentional content can make a comeback, not in spite of AI but because of it — because the machines can take on the meaninglessness. They can churn out the filler, the standard, the expected. And us? Us humans, who’ve been rendered numb by the noise and dulled by the sameness?

We get to make something better. We get to be part of a renaissance.

It won’t be a loud one. There will be no oil paintings or papal commissions. Just a quiet return to the idea that content can carry weight.

Let Us Return to Meaning

When my editor, Tim, and I were riffing on ideas for this piece, he called it a love letter to content. As I brain-dumped my way through a first draft, as I polished and re-polished, I ended up here instead.

With an invitation, a hope-filled suggestion, that we come home.

That we pick up where we left off, with the original bargain we so carelessly allowed to gather dust: create something of value for the reader, and in return, earn their trust, attention, and loyalty.

Yes, AI can support us. It can — and will — generate. But only we can mean. Only we (maddeningly, imperfectly, humanly) can set our jaws in defiance and refuse to let our profession be flattened into noise.

What comes next, if we have the guts and attention spans to do it, could be a body of work to be proud of. Not propped up by word count or speed, but by the meaning we insist on making. By the care we bring to a world desperate to automate its way out of it.

That’s culture. That’s legacy. And it’s unapologetically, unironically, something worth fighting for.

The industry-wide erosion of meaning described here plays out in individual workflows too. For a raw, personal account of how AI dependency can hollow out a writer's creative process, read Confessions of an AI Addict: one marketer's honest reckoning with algorithmic seduction and the fight to reclaim original thinking.