#aislop
The average sentence: why your
AI-generated content might be
costing you more than you think
Jacinta Bolsenbroek, Diector of Communication
⏱ 3min read
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YOU MIGHT LIKE
THE RISK OF NOTHING
If your competitor could publish exactly the same paragraph with their logo on it, what is the paragraph actually doing for your brand?
There’s a particular kind of sentence appearing everywhere at the moment.
You’ve probably read it without really noticing. It is polished, grammatically correct and perfectly pleasant to read. It talks about unlocking potential, driving meaningful impact, navigating an ever-changing landscape or creating opportunities for growth. It sounds professional. It sounds considered. It sounds like marketing.
And yet, somehow, it says almost nothing.
The problem isn’t necessarily that the sentence was written by AI. The problem is that it could have been written by almost anyone.
That distinction matters, particularly for businesses investing more and more of their time and money into content.
There is a lot of conversation about whether businesses should be using AI to write. Some people think it is cheating. Others think it is the greatest productivity tool to arrive in decades. There are arguments about originality, creativity, jobs and whether a machine can ever really write.
But perhaps there is a more interesting question to ask.
What happens to language when a huge amount of it starts converging on the same average?
AI is very good at being average
Generative AI is remarkably sophisticated, but at its simplest level, these tools are built to predict what is statistically likely to come next.
Give a model a sentence and it predicts the next word. Give it a paragraph and it predicts what should come next. Give it a brief for a website article, a social post or a company announcement and it draws on enormous amounts of existing language to produce something that fits the request.
That is precisely why it is so useful.
It knows what a professional business article generally sounds like. It knows what a LinkedIn post looks like. It knows how a marketing email is usually structured. It has seen an extraordinary amount of writing and can reproduce the patterns with impressive speed.
But there is an interesting consequence to that.
When the goal is to predict the most likely next word, the output naturally tends towards what is familiar, conventional and statistically probable.
In other words, towards the average.
And the average is not necessarily bad. In fact, most of the time, average is perfectly functional. It gets the job done. It communicates the basic idea. It is clear, safe and unlikely to offend anyone.
It is just not particularly memorable. Often it is missing something…
And when everyone has access to the same tools, that starts to become a problem.
We are already starting to sound the same
Look at enough business content and you start to notice the patterns.
Check your LinkedIn, you’ll notice businesses are “unlocking new opportunities”, “driving meaningful change” and “building stronger connections”. Teams are “leveraging technology”, “embracing innovation” and “navigating complexity”. Customers are “at the heart of everything we do”.
None of these phrases are inherently wrong.
The problem is that they have become so familiar that they barely make us stop and think anymore.
This was happening long before ChatGPT existed. Corporate marketing has always had a habit of sanding the interesting edges off language. Businesses want to sound professional, so they remove anything that feels too casual. They want to sound credible, so they use words they associate with credibility. They want to appeal to everyone, so they avoid saying anything that might exclude someone.
Eventually, everyone starts using the same words to say roughly the same thing.
AI hasn’t created that problem. It has simply made it much easier to scale.
A marketer who once had half a day to write an article can now generate ten versions in minutes. A business that struggled to produce regular content can suddenly publish three times a week. A team with limited resources can create website copy, social posts, newsletters and campaign ideas almost instantly.
That is genuinely useful.
But if all of those businesses are using the same technology, drawing from the same patterns and asking for the same polished business language, there is a risk that we end up with an enormous amount of content that is technically different but emotionally indistinguishable.
Different businesses.
Different industries.
Different websites.
Same voice.
Your audience notices, even if they can’t explain why
This is where the conversation becomes much more relevant to marketing.
Most people cannot identify AI-generated writing with certainty. There is no magic sentence structure that proves a machine wrote something, and humans have been writing bland corporate copy perfectly well for decades.
But readers are increasingly good at recognising when something doesn’t feel particularly human.
They might not know why.
They simply get to the end of a paragraph and think: Okay. So what?
There is a difference between understanding what a business has written and actually believing it.
That difference is important.
Because businesses aren’t producing content simply to fill their websites. They are trying to establish credibility, demonstrate expertise, build relationships and ultimately persuade people to choose them.
Trust is part of that equation.
And when your content sounds generic, your audience has less reason to believe that there is any particular thinking behind it.
If your competitor could publish exactly the same paragraph with their logo on it, what is the paragraph actually doing for your brand?
The real cost isn’t using AI. It’s losing your voice (which is unique)
This is why the argument shouldn’t be “AI is bad”.
It isn’t.
Used well, AI can be incredibly useful for marketers. It can help turn a collection of rough thoughts into a structure. It can challenge an idea, suggest alternative approaches, identify gaps or provide a starting point when the blank page is staring back at you.
It can take some of the grunt work out of marketing.
The problem comes when the tool starts doing the thinking as well.
Because there is a temptation to give AI a brief, accept the first polished answer and move on.
It looks finished.
That’s the dangerous bit.
Those are the questions that create interesting content.
AI can help you get those thoughts onto a page.
It shouldn’t be responsible for having them for you.
Your brand should sound like someone - give it some spark
A strong brand voice isn’t about finding a collection of clever adjectives and putting them into a brand guideline.
It’s about having a recognisable point of view.
It is the way your people actually talk. It is the words you naturally use. It is the stories you tell. It is the opinions you are prepared to stand behind. It is the slightly unexpected phrase that makes something feel like it could only have come from your business.
That is what makes content recognisable.
And recognisability matters.
If you removed your logo from your website, could someone still tell it was yours?
Could they tell it wasn’t your competitor’s?
Could they hear your voice in the words?
If the answer is no, there is probably a bigger marketing problem than whether or not AI wrote the copy.
The future belongs to distinctive thinking
AI is going to make content easier to produce. There is no going back from that, and businesses shouldn’t want to.
The interesting shift will be what happens when content becomes abundant.
When everyone can produce a perfectly acceptable blog article in ten minutes, the blog article itself becomes less valuable.
The advantage moves somewhere else.
It moves to the idea.
The experience behind it.
The expertise.
The story.
The opinion.
The specificity.
The ability to say something that another business couldn’t simply copy and paste into its own website.
In a world where machines are very good at producing the statistically likely next word, the human advantage may be knowing what is worth saying in the first place.
So, use AI.
Use it to make your work faster. Use it to challenge your thinking. Use it to get past the blank page. Use it for the repetitive jobs that nobody particularly enjoys.
Just don’t let it turn your brand into the average of everything that has already been written.
Because your customers don’t need another business that sounds professional.
They need a reason to believe you.
And sometimes, the most valuable thing your marketing can do is sound unmistakably like you.