Why AI Will Improve Content Quality, Not Degrade It

Since ChatGPT launched, I’ve been hearing the same fear expressed over and over, particularly in marketing circles: AI will drown us in low-quality content. The argument goes that AI makes content creation so cheap and easy that we’ll be flooded with mediocre, AI-generated “slop” that pollutes the internet. This creates a vicious cycle where models trained on slop produce even worse content. (Though interestingly, some early returns on training with synthetic data seem to contradict this prediction, but the jury is definitely still out.)

I think this logic misses something fundamental. Far from degrading content quality, there’s a good chance AI is poised to spark an influx of high-quality writing on the web.

My thesis is straightforward:

• If you have a strong incentive to influence people (which every brand does—along with many other groups and organizations)
• And if more people continue to make decisions based on AI outputs (up for debate, but ChatGPT just added one million users in a single hour this week)
• Then producing high-quality content becomes essential

These models aren’t dumb. You can argue where they fall on the intelligence spectrum, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say they have, at minimum, an average IQ. Moreover, they’re only getting better. If brands want to influence what AI tells consumers, they will need to create content that models recognize as authoritative and valuable.

Put simply: actions follow money. If slop isn’t effective at influencing people, businesses won’t pursue that approach (of course, this isn’t to say that we still won’t see an influx of nefarious actors flooding the web with junk to pick up pennies where they can). Fundamentally, though, I believe this is where doom scenarios about AI content collapse—they ignore the market forces that have always shaped media.

The Paywall Opportunity

Consumer growth of these platforms isn’t the only market force at play. As AI adoption grows, publishers are moving to harder and harder paywalls, pushing for direct deals with the model providers to access their content. This has and will create a content vacuum—something anyone who has used ChatGPT Deep Research has certainly noticed—where the highest quality writing isn’t necessarily making it into the LLM’s response.