What I Got Wrong About AI-Generated Content in 2023

In 2023 I published a post on this site that was written entirely by ChatGPT, credited to "ChatGPT" as the author, as a kind of experiment. At the time it felt like a novelty. Three years on, it reads like a time capsule of exactly the wrong lesson.

The mistake wasn't using AI. It's that the post skipped the part that actually matters: a process for using it well.

What I'd say to 2023 me

AI-generated content isn't good or bad in itself, it's unfinished by default. A first draft from a model is exactly that, a first draft. The gap between "AI wrote this" and "this is worth publishing" is entirely down to what happens after the generation: fact-checking, structural editing, adding the specific expertise and examples only you have, and cutting the parts that are technically correct but say nothing.

I've written about this more directly since, the issue was never the prompts. It was the missing system for using AI output as a starting point rather than a finished one.

What's different in 2026

Search engines and AI models have both gotten considerably better at telling generic AI output from content with real expertise behind it. The posts on this site that perform best now are the ones with a specific point of view, drawn from actual client work, not the ones optimised to sound comprehensive. Volume of AI-generated content is no longer an advantage, if it ever was. Distinctiveness is.

The practical takeaway

Use AI to draft, structure, and speed up research. Don't use it to skip the judgement calls that only someone who actually knows the subject can make. That's true for a blog post and it's true for most of what AI gets used for in marketing right now.

If you want help building a content process that uses AI properly instead of leaning on it, get in touch.