Brand is what makes you different. AI slop is making everything else sound the same. The businesses that win over the next few years won’t be the ones using AI the most. They’ll be the ones with a point of view clear enough that AI can’t flatten it.
Everyone’s suddenly a content machine
A few years ago, writing a website, an Instagram caption, or a sales page took time. Now it takes a prompt.
That’s not a bad thing on its own. I use AI in my own business, and I’ll get into exactly how, further down. But here’s what I’ve been noticing: when everyone has access to the same tools, asking the same kind of questions, a lot of businesses are starting to sound exactly the same.
Same openers. Same three point lists. Same “in today’s market” energy. You’ve probably scrolled past ten versions of it this week without remembering a single one.
There’s a name for this now: AI slop. It became official enough that Merriam-Webster made “slop” its word of the year for 2025. It’s not really about quality in the traditional sense. The content is often grammatically fine. It’s just generic. Faceless. Forgettable. It could have come from any business, which means it doesn’t actually do its job for yours.
The real risk: a billion businesses sounding exactly the same
Here’s the bit that matters most for you as a founder.
Your brand isn’t your logo, your colours, or your tagline. It’s your positioning. It’s what makes you different from every other business solving a similar problem, and it’s the reason a customer chooses you over someone else doing roughly the same thing.
When everyone uses AI the same way to write their content, their messaging, even their positioning, you end up with a market full of businesses that all sound interchangeable. If your brand doesn’t have a clear point of view before you start generating anything, AI won’t create one for you. It can’t. It can only reflect what’s already out there, which is exactly the problem.
This is why brand work has to come first. Not after you’ve built your content calendar. Not as a nice to have once the basics are sorted. It should come before any of that.
This isn’t just a smart marketing move. It’s your bottom line.
I want to be really direct about this part, because it tends to get treated as fluffy when it isn’t.
Trust is what gets people to buy. Generic, robotic sounding content slows trust down, because people can feel when something wasn’t really written for them. A clear, consistent brand builds that trust faster, because it shows up the same way every time and it actually sounds like a real person wrote it.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 86% of people globally now refuse to buy from brands they don’t trust, up from 81% the year before, and it’s only moving in one direction. Brand isn’t separate from revenue. It’s one of the biggest levers you have over it.
If you haven’t done the groundwork on your own positioning yet, that’s genuinely the place to start. I’ve written about how to approach this in brand positioning and brand strategy.
I’m not saying don’t use AI. Here’s exactly how I used it for this article.
I’m not anti-AI. I use it in my business every day, and I think founders who avoid it entirely are leaving real time on the table. What I’m against is using it without a point of view behind it.
So let me be fully transparent about this piece, because I think how something gets made matters, especially when the article is about exactly this.
I used Claude to help write this article. Here’s the actual process:
- I started with the topic and my own point of view: brand matters more in a world of AI slop, and AI should be the tool, not the decision maker.
- Before any writing happened, I had it interview me. It asked me what I actually believe, what my real opinion is, and where I wanted to take the piece. That’s the opposite of typing in a topic and letting it run.
- We agreed on a structure together. I reviewed it, made changes, and approved it before a single sentence of the article was drafted.
- I’ve built what’s called system-level prompts into how I work. That’s a fancy way of saying I’ve taught the AI tools I use what my brand actually sounds like, what frameworks I use, and how I think about positioning, so it’s pulling from how I actually talk and think, not generic patterns scraped off the internet.
- Using that grounding, it wrote a draft in my voice.
- I edited it after that. Nothing goes out the door without me reading every line.
That’s the difference between using AI to replace your voice and using it to scale it.
While I’m being upfront about this, I’ll go one further: the cover image on this article was AI-generated too. I gave it direction and a reference photo of myself, and it generated the image from there. I think being honest about when and how AI shows up in my work builds more trust, not less, so I’d rather tell you than have you wonder.
AI is the force multiplier – it’s not the chef
Here’s the way I think about it.
AI is changing fast, and learning to use it well is genuinely saving me real time. But it has to be human led, always.
Think of it like baking a cake. You want fresh ingredients. You want it to taste like you made it, because that’s the whole reason someone wants to eat it in the first place. If you hand the ingredient list over to AI completely and just let it pick whatever’s lying around, you don’t actually know what’s in the final product. It might look fine. It might even taste fine. But it won’t taste like yours.
This isn’t a new problem. It’s the same garbage in, garbage out rule that’s been true of every tool we’ve ever used in business, from CRMs to spreadsheets to content generators. The output is only ever as good as what you feed it. Give it the good stuff. Give it your actual point of view, your real experience, your specific way of saying things. That’s what makes the output worth using.
What this means for your business
Before you generate anything with AI, whether it’s content, messaging, or your positioning, get clear on your own point of view first. A few questions worth sitting with:
- What makes you different from the business next to you doing something similar?
- Could a competitor say the exact same thing you just wrote? If so, it’s not your brand talking.
- Does this sound like you, or could it have come from anyone?
If you can’t answer the first one clearly yet, that’s not a content problem. That’s a brand problem, and it’s worth solving before you write another word.
A few quick questions people ask me about this
What is AI slop? It’s the term for generic, AI-generated content that lacks a clear point of view or brand voice. It’s usually technically correct but forgettable, because it could have come from any business.
Does using AI for content mean I don’t need a brand strategy? No, the opposite. AI makes brand strategy more important, not less. Without a clear point of view to direct it, AI tends to default to generic, safe, sameish output. Your brand strategy is what gives it direction.
How do I stop my content sounding like everyone else’s? Start with your own positioning before you generate anything. Know what makes you different, write that down in your own words, and use it to guide whatever you create next, AI-assisted or not.
Where to start
If you’ve read this far and you’re not totally sure what makes you different yet, that’s genuinely the place to begin. Not more content. Not another AI tool. Your actual point of view.
Start with brand positioning or brand strategy. Get clear on that first, and everything else, including anything you create with AI, will actually sound like you.