The Backlash Against AI-Generated Content Has Begun
When "AI slop" makes us suspicious of EVERYTHING.
A couple of weeks ago, I invented a new job category for squirrels.
It’s fall here in Atlanta, and the tennis and pickleball courts across the street from my house are surrounded by trees. That means leaves. LOTS of leaves. But even more hazardous are the acorns.
Now, acorns on their own aren’t hazardous... except when you’re running around the courts slipping on them. It doesn’t help either when a ball hits an acorn on the ground and goes spiraling off in an unexpected direction. Great advantage when you’re on the offense, not so much when trying to return the darn ball.
Those acorns are EVERYWHERE this time of year. We sweep them off before playing, sweep them off during play, and occasionally get pinged on the head as another batch comes raining down. At times, it sounds like hail.
I looked at all those acorns and thought: This is ridiculous. We need squirrels. But not just your ordinary squirrels. Line Squirrels.
If you watch professional tennis, you’ll see ball boys and ball girls rush onto the court between points to scoop up stray balls. I envisioned a similarly efficient squirrel, properly outfitted, darting onto the court between points, gathering the acorns into a little satchel and scurrying away. It’s a win-win! Players get a clean court. Squirrels get a huge, easy-to-gather stash to feed their families throughout the winter.
There was just one problem. I couldn’t find a squirrel willing to put on the uniform.
So I did what any reasonable person would do. I took a real photo of our acorn-covered tennis court. Then I used ChatGPT to create a cartoon squirrel dressed for the job, complete with his nut-gathering bag, along with some fun lettering that said “Line Squirrel.” I brought everything into Canva, put my imaginary freelancer on my very real tennis court, and posted it.
It was cute, silly, and obviously a joke.
Then someone called it “AI slop.”
WHAAT??
That surprised me. This wouldn’t have happened a year ago. People might have posted, “Cute.” Or “I can relate.” Or even, “When you find a good one, send it my way.”
But it’s 2026, and I understand the criticism. People have had it up to here with unwanted AI spam. Our feeds are full of AI-generated content right now, and much of it has a sameness that’s become painfully easy to spot.
But back to my Line Squirrel.
What stopped me wasn’t the label itself. It was how quickly the label ended the conversation. People aren’t asking, “Is this good?” They’re asking, “Is this AI?” And that's a very different question.
My Line Squirrel wasn’t an AI idea. The idea came from me standing on a tennis court, looking at an absurd number of acorns and thinking like the slightly ridiculous human being I apparently am. The photograph was mine. The joke was mine. AI simply allowed me to create one element I couldn’t realistically produce myself.
I wasn’t about to wrestle a live squirrel into a tennis uniform.
But the reaction told me something important: the pendulum is swinging. We’re becoming so sensitized to AI-generated content that sometimes the mere whiff of AI is enough to make us dismiss the whole thing.
How Did “Good Writing” Start Looking Like AI?
Part of the problem is that AI has developed some pretty recognizable tells. And once we notice them, we start seeing them everywhere.
Remember the early days of ubiquitous emojis? Rocket ships apparently meant you had a really great idea.
Then came the em dash. Its wake still leaves many human writers with a bit of angst. The em dash is a perfectly legitimate punctuation mark, but AI used it so relentlessly that suddenly human writers were getting side-eye for using it correctly.
Then there’s the rule of three. Three examples. Three adjectives. Three reasons. Over and over and over again. The funny thing is, the rule of three is an actual writing principle because three is satisfying, memorable and often funny. AI didn’t invent it. It learned it from us.
Now we have every sentence getting its own paragraph.
Why? Because it’s easier on the eye. It creates emphasis. It keeps people scrolling.
It’s also exhausting when everything is written that way.
(Yeah, I deliberately spaced those sentences out like this.) Hey, AI. A little goes a long way.
But we're not done yet! Add in the familiar rhythms, predictable sentence structures and that polished, word-perfect conversational tone, and we’ve reached a strange point: AI learned how to write from good human writing, and now good human writers can be penalized for sounding like AI.
I know, because I’ve already seen it happen.
I’m a good writer. I was a good writer before ChatGPT showed up. I’ve been published, and I know how to structure an argument and turn a phrase. I’m certainly not going to start writing badly just to prove I’m human.
I contributed a chapter on video and YouTube to The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever, a collaborative marketing book spearheaded by marketing strategist and futurist Mark Schaefer and published in 2023. My chapter was written by me and edited by a human editor. The same was true for the other 35 writers. The book was deliberately structured and tightly edited to make it a useful, cohesive handbook.
And some people assumed it was AI-written.
Think about that. The very qualities we used to associate with good professional work - clear structure, polished writing, consistency - can now make people suspicious that a human didn’t create it.
Aargh, That can’t be where this takes us.
So Where Does AI (or AI-Generated Content) Belong?
I don’t believe the answer is to stop using AI. I certainly haven’t stopped. AI can be enormously useful for organizing ideas, researching possibilities, challenging your thinking, brainstorming, getting past a blank page and helping turn a pile of thoughts into something you can work with.
But right now, I think we need to be much more conscious of where AI ends and the human begins.
I saw another sign of the backlash today, this time in my own acting world. Brian Beegle, a highly respected commercial casting director here in Atlanta, came out strongly against actors using AI readers for self-taped auditions: “If you used AI as your reader you need to know it is totally cringeworthy.” Then, even more emphatically: “NEVER use AI.”
That’s quite a warning. An audition is fundamentally human. The actor isn’t performing in a vacuum; we’re responding to another person. Replace that person with AI and you may gain convenience, but risk losing the very thing the audition is supposed to reveal: human connection.
So where does AI belong? Backstage as your virtual assistant or researcher. Or guide. (Just remember that it tends to make up stuff when it can't find what it needs!) It's a great tool to help you sort your thoughts and present options, especially things you might have missed, like emails waiting for replies. All that tedious work? Yup, offload it so you can focus on the important stuff. That's where AI excels.
But when what you create becomes human-facing, put the human back in.
Rewrite the post until it sounds unmistakably like you. Don’t accept a presentation just because AI organized it beautifully. Ask whether you are in it. Does it follow your thinking, have your perspective? Or does it sound awfully generic?
If you’re creating a video designed to build trust with an audience, think very carefully before replacing your face, your voice or your quirks with something synthetic, simply because you can. People want to see a real person, not your carefully curated avatar or a simile of your voice reading something flawlessly. All that polish screams "Fake!" That kind of perfection quickly becomes commonplace and boring, and boring keeps you broke.
I see a version of this in my voiceover work, too. AI voices can be remarkably good, and they’ll continue to improve. For certain applications, they may be perfectly adequate. But “adequate” and “connected” aren’t the same thing. Clients want to hear a real person in a real situation saying their words, and more of them are now returning to using human voice actors. (Yay.)
A human performer simply brings something different to the process. A perspective and an interpretation. This hits home with clients who care deeply about the exact intention behind a line, the subtle shift in meaning, the relationship with the listener, or the emotional arc across a longer piece. This stuff matters. There is discernment and an instinct at work, an emotional subtext that often gets to the crux of the idea far better than any spoken word. The viewer or listener may not be able to put their finger on it, but these are the tiny choices that tell another human being there is a living, breathing person someone on the other side of the communication.
All this applies well beyond voice over to the work you do.
Whether you’re writing a LinkedIn post, delivering a presentation, recording a video, creating a newsletter or speaking to a prospective client, your audience isn’t merely processing your information. They’re deciding what they think of you.
They're evaluating: Do I trust you? Do I believe you? Are you saying something because you actually have something to say? Or am I consuming another piece of content manufactured to fill a slot on a content calendar?
That’s the danger of AI. It's not really that AI was involved in the making of a piece of content. It's that the human being disappeared in the process.
Eventually, I suspect we’ll find our equilibrium. AI will become another tool in the toolbox, and we may stop being quite so preoccupied with whether it touched a piece of content somewhere along the way. But we're not there yet.
My best advice?
Right now, if your business depends on people trusting you,
remembering you or choosing you, err on the side of being unmistakably human.
The answer isn’t to make our work sloppier so nobody suspects we had help. It’s to make it more distinctly ours:
Our stories
Our observations
Our sense of humor
Our opinions
Our peculiar turns of phrase
All those "ours" are deliberate. Own your uniqueness and don't be concerned about sharing it with the world. It's often these little things, imperfect though they (and we) may be, that people find relatable. These are the things that come from actually having lived a life, rather than processing a prompt.
That’s the distinction we should be paying attention to. Not simply, “Was AI involved?” but, “Is there a human being in here?” It's become my core message: Your humanity is your competitive edge in an AI world.
Even if, occasionally, you need AI to put a squirrel in a tennis uniform.
So What Do YOU Think of My Cartoon AI Images?
I couldn't resist using AI to create the images in this blog. What matters, though, is how they're received. And I really want to know. Do you like them? Consider them AI slop? Or simply indifferent?
I chose to use them because I have an idea that I can't find a real photo of... and I'm certainly not an animator or really, any type of graphic design artist. Human idea, automated execution of it done super-fast.
Seriously, let me know in the comments what you think.
In the meantime, I thought you might be interested in this upcoming masterclass....
Are You in Danger of Becoming AI's Version of a Stepford Wife?
Here’s the danger: in the race to crank out more content faster, people are outsourcing the very things that make them worth listening to: their ideas, opinions, creativity, and voice. The result? A whole lot of polished, perfectly acceptable… blah.
Don’t become AI’s version of a Stepford Wife: shiny on the outside, generic on the inside. Use AI, absolutely. Just don’t hand over the keys to your personality. I'm sharing some of my best techniques in this upcoming free masterclass:
Is AI Turning You Into a Stepford Wife?
Tuesday, November 10
2 pm EST / 11 am PST
All attendees receive a free Stepford survival guide.
(Yes, there is such a thing.)
I’m Laura Doman, a film and TV actor, voice actor, and communication strategist. As a performer, I bring characters and stories to life, from the CEO you’d trust to the best friend who tells you what you need to hear. As a coach, I help professionals make their expertise come through on camera, on stage, and in the room, so people pay attention, trust them, and take action.
