Quality is the only moat left

“The marginal cost of plausible bullshit is now effectively zero.” This perfectly captures the current state of content. It’s a deluge of bullshit. AI can generate infinite “professional” LinkedIn posts about leadership lessons from making coffee. Everyone’s inbox drowns in automated drip campaigns. Your feed? Indistinguishable corporate content soup.

Naval tweeted that “there’s no demand for average content” (and also “media is a winner-take-all market” which is interesting but we won’t tackle today). He’s right. We’re approaching content blindness - the same way we learned to ignore tv & online banner ads in the 90s. and uhh… still now.

At Primer.ai, we tracked the misinformation problem. Nation-states were already scaling disinformation with cheap labor in China and North Korea. AI just made it free. Now curation and signals of validity matter more than ever.

A friend in advertising told me: “Streaming fragmentation killed our ability to reach people. Nobody knows where anyone watches anything anymore.” Another friend, a content marketer, predicted: “In six months, people will tune out LinkedIn corporate posts like they tune out email drip campaigns. Straight to spam!”

They’re both right, but we can’t let this cause us to miss the real opportunity. When everyone can publish, when AI handles the grunt work of content creation, what survives? Resonance. As Stepfanie Tyler writes: “Audiences don’t care about your process. They care about resonance. “Your weird obsessions, contrarian takes, specific expertise - these become more valuable as generic content becomes worthless. The things AI can’t fake: lived experience, genuine insight, the courage to be wrong in interesting ways. The courage to explore and live freely.

“AI handles the grunt work. Humans handle the vision.” Embrace the tools for what they are. Let them handle research, editing, synthesis. But the vision - the thing that makes people stop scrolling - that’s still yours.

Quality isn’t just differentiator anymore. It’s the only moat left.

p.s. can’t wait to show you what I’ve been working on!