HIGH, MIDDLE, LOW: WHERE WILL CONTENT WRITING GO?

Recently, I had read the story about how an AI-written ad had outperformed a human writer’s ad. To me, that was an earth-shaking development. It's exciting where technology is taking us. I had also mused about what it meant for human copywriters on my blog. I had the chance to chat with Prashant Kumar, founder & senior partner at Entropia (later acquired by Accenture), about this.

Prashant is currently one of THE rock stars of the industry because Entropia is a disrupting force, bringing a whole new paradigm into the industry. I was interviewing him for a client’s thought leadership book project, so it was a great opportunity to exchange ideas about how the communications industry was changing.

High-end, Low-end, or The End?

As we chatted over lunch, he predicted that the way audiences consume content will shift to the extremes. There will be cheap, low-end throwaway content and there will be the premium-quality content that is worth people spending extra time and money for. People will go for the low-end content because it doesn’t cost them much time and effort to check out a few lines

But people will always take time and effort to appreciate good quality content.

The middle ground will be decimated because no one will have the patience to tolerate mediocrity anymore.

The key to survival is either to be a very low-end content producer churning out intense volume , or be a high-quality content producer and charge a premium. In my view, the middle ground will probably be where the robots copywriters thrive, churning out volumes of OK copy for ads and other content.

Bucking The Trend. But How?

For example, the conventional wisdom today is that long-form digital content does not work. The advice is normally to keep it at about 300 to 500 words. But my three highest-performing digital content were between 2,500 and 5000 words. Many of my other digital content that were very well-received were over 1,000 words long too.

Why?

The answer doesn't lie in the length or the media - it lies in the readers themselves.

As Prashant said, people will not have patience for mediocre content anymore. And let’s be honest, a lot of the stuff on the internet is mediocre! Audiences will flick through content, giving it 30 to 60 seconds of their time before deciding whether to continue or drop it. This will repeat until they find something that really grabs their attention. Then they will take as much time as they need to finish consuming the content.

We can’t stop the rise of the machines. AI content will definitely shrink the market for human writers, but machines do have their kryptonite: they can only do what they are programmed to do. They cannot create high-quality, original content. That’s up to humans.

Ultimately, how writers respond to the AI challenge – whether we go high, medium or low-end – is an entirely individual and human decision.

(First published in August 2019)

2026 update:

Seven years on, the prediction still holds. But the shape of disruption looks different from what any of us had imagined back then.

Low-end content didn't just grow — it exploded. Anyone with a free AI account can produce a thousand words of grammatically perfect, structurally sound, completely forgettable content before their morning coffee goes cold. Ironically, the tools that democratised content writing have democratised mediocrity at industrial scale as well.

Audiences are increasingly fatigued by the saturation of generic, AI-generated content that sounds the same like every other post. Consumers aren’t just ignoring AI-generated content; they’re rejecting it.

The data bears this out. In early 2026, 54% of Americans report experiencing AI content fatigue, leading to lower engagement rates, trust issues, and a perception that content was "soulless". Platforms have noticed too. Major search engines and social platforms are deprioritising mass-produced AI content to combat "AI slop" and protect user experience.

On the other hand, the appetite for real thought leadership has actually increased. The 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that more than half of decision-makers and C-suite leaders still spend at least an hour a week reading thought leadership. 60% say good thought leadership makes them willing to pay a premium, and 86% say they would invite a company to participate in an RFP based on the quality of its thought leadership alone. But only 15% of B2B decision-makers and C-suite executives described the thought leadership they consume as "very good" or "excellent", leaving a large gap for high-quality, impactful insights.

Here's the paradox:

The deluge of poor-quality thought leadership is making real thought leadership fight harder for attention. But it also means that a piece of writing that carries a real insights is rare and stands out more clearly.

And rare things always command attention, trust, and premium.