AI Content Is the New Content Farm
We spent a decade killing content farms. Now everyone's building them again with ChatGPT. Same garbage, shinier packaging, faster production.
Remember Demand Media? eHow? Associated Content? The content farms that poisoned search results in the late 2000s?
Cheap content, mass-produced, optimized for keywords, zero editorial standards. Google eventually nuked them with the Panda update in 2011.
We're doing it again.
The AI Content Gold Rush
Every SEO Twitter account is now posting about "AI content at scale." The playbook is obvious (and pairs nicely with content calendars that demand volume over quality):
1. Feed ChatGPT a keyword list
2. Generate thousands of articles
3. Publish them to your site
4. Profit???
It's the same content farm model. The only difference is the production cost dropped from $5 per article to $0.005.
The Quality Problem
AI content has a fundamental problem: it can only remix what already exists.
It can't do original research. It can't have unique experiences. It can't develop genuine expertise. It can't form real opinions.
All it can do is regurgitate and rephrase existing information. Which is exactly what content farms did - just slower and more expensively.
The result is an internet flooded with content that says nothing new. Thousands of articles that all read the same because they're all trained on the same data.
Google Will Catch Up
Google killed content farms once. They'll do it again.
Right now, AI content is slipping through because it's new. But Google has teams working on AI detection. They have more compute power than anyone. They have every incentive to solve this problem.
When the next "AI Panda" update hits, sites built on AI content will crater overnight. Just like the content farms did in 2011.
History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
The Real AI Opportunity
AI is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used well or poorly.
Bad use: Generate content at scale to rank for keywords.
Good use: Speed up research. Draft outlines. Edit and improve human writing. Generate ideas to react to.
The difference is whether AI replaces human insight or augments it.
A human who uses AI to write faster and better will beat both pure AI content and pure human content. But pure AI content is just a faster content farm.
The Sustainable Path
If you're thinking about AI content, ask yourself: Would this content exist if there were no search engines?
If the answer is no - if the only reason to create it is to rank for keywords - you're building a content farm. It might work for a while. It won't work forever.
The sustainable path is the same as it's always been: create something genuinely valuable that helps real people. Use AI to do it faster if you want. But don't outsource the thinking.
AI content at scale is just content farming with better technology. The crash is coming. Build something real instead.