I haven’t posted a new podcast episode in seven weeks.
I teach AI content strategy for a living. I coach mortgage professionals, realtors and coaches how to show up consistently online. And I went seven weeks without publishing a single episode.
Was I too busy? That’s the dressed-up version. The real reason? I got bored with what content looks like right now.
Open LinkedIn and scroll for 30 seconds. Count the em dashes and the “short choppy sentences” that somehow all have the same rhythm. Notice how many posts open with a one-line hook, followed by a line break, followed by a counterintuitive statement that isn’t actually counterintuitive.
AI gave everyone access at the same time. For $20 a month, you too can be a thought leader. The result is a watered-down content echo chamber. Louder, faster, and somehow emptier than before.
Here is the uncomfortable part: I am at least a little bit inside the problem I am describing. And I think a lot of content creators are right now, whether they admit it or not.
Why Does AI Content Sound Generic?
AI content sounds generic because most people start with the tool instead of starting with something to say.
When you open Claude (or ChatGPT and Gemini) without a clear point of view, a specific audience, or a story only you can tell, you get output that reflects the average of everything it has been trained on. Which is exactly what you get when everyone else does the same thing: the same frameworks, the same sentence structures, the same ideas repackaged in slightly different order.
AI does not create original thought. It organizes and mirrors the thinking you bring to it.
The problem is not that people are using AI. It is that most people are skipping the one step that determines whether AI-assisted content is worth reading: having something original to say before you open the tool.
Is This an AI Problem?
No. The content slump is not new. AI just made it impossible to ignore.
Content creators have always wrestled with the dry spells and the “what is even the point of this” moments. That has always been part of the job.
What AI did was democratize the appearance of consistency. You can now publish every day without ever sitting with an original idea. And when everyone can do that, the noise goes up. The signal stays the same. Your audience gets better at scrolling past it.
For the record: my brand book is done. My prompts are dialed. I have done the foundational work I ask my clients to do. And I still hit a wall and questioned what I was adding to.
That is worth naming. Because if you have done the work and still feel the pull toward generic, the issue is not your tools. It is the question underneath the content: why am I creating this, and who actually needs to hear it?
What Separates Good AI Content from AI Slop?
The people creating genuinely good AI-assisted content think like storytellers first. They know their audience, their message, and the problem they solve before they open any tool.
I see this clearly in my work with clients. The ones who complete their brand foundations write better content than the average user because they bring something different to it.
Rather than creating content to rank in AI search first, they are creating content to serve a specific person who has a specific problem. The visibility follows the value, not the other way around.
When you do not know your message, who needs to hear it, or what problem you solve, AI cannot fix that. It makes the emptiness louder.
Why You Feel Overwhelmed by AI Content Pressure
The overwhelm most people feel around AI content is not a skill problem. It is a direction problem.
I am in rooms with C-suite executives, marketing leaders, AI developers, and mortgage coaches. The conversations are not mostly about tools and tips anymore. They are about weight. The constant pressure to adopt the next thing. The paralysis of too many options. The quiet dread of falling behind.
AI was supposed to give us efficiency. And in some ways it does. But it also creates a new category of work that did not exist before: chasing, evaluating, testing, and abandoning tools in a cycle that never stops.
You trade one kind of time drain for another. And if you are not careful, you end up spending more hours managing AI workflows than you would have spent just writing the thing yourself.
The antidote is direction.
How to Stop Creating Generic Content: The Goal-First Framework
Start with a business goal, not an AI tool. Then reverse engineer the AI workflow that serves that specific goal.
This is the shift that changes everything. Instead of opening AI and hoping something useful comes out, start by identifying one thing you want to do better in your business and work backward from there.
Some examples of what that looks like in practice:
If you want to be more consistent on video: Look at tools like Descript, which has AI editing built in. Learn one workflow inside that tool and practice it until it feels automatic.
If you want to launch a blog: Sit down with Claude and build a repeatable process for how each post gets written, structured, and optimized. Create a custom tool that does this consistently over time so it gets easier, not harder.
If you want better email content: Start by dumping your actual voice into the AI first. Tell it a story. Describe a client situation. Give it your words before you ask it to write yours.
The goal narrows the field. Instead of a runway so wide you do not know where to start, you have one lane and one destination.
How to Get Out of a Content Slump
Get outside the echo chamber. Stop looking at your peers for inspiration. Let your brain breathe before you ask AI to help fill the space.
If the content you are consuming all looks the same, the ideas you generate will too. Go follow people in completely different industries. Read something that has nothing to do with your niche. Go for a walk without a podcast in your ears.
Original ideas do not come from scrolling the same feed you always scroll.
Content is like the gym. Missing a day is fine. But one day becomes a week, and a week becomes seven weeks, and at some point you are not resting. The answer to a slump is showing up anyway, even when what you make feels small.
This episode is me showing up after seven weeks. I hit record without an outline and shared from my heart.
Treating AI as a Partner, Not a Genie
AI works best as a collaborative partner, not a replacement for original thinking.
The clearest sign someone is using AI as a crutch is the quality of the ideas underneath the content. When you ask AI to generate the concept and the execution, you get exactly the kind of posts everyone has been scrolling past.
When you bring your story, your context, your specific expertise, and your audience’s real problem to the conversation first, and then use AI to help you build it out, the content sounds like you. Because it is.
The goal is not to have AI create your content. The goal is to have AI help you say what you already know, faster and more clearly than you could alone.
Your story is the one thing AI cannot copy. Your lived experience, the clients you have helped through hard situations, the insight you have built over years in the work, none of that is in any training dataset. That is yours.
Use AI to organize and extend what is already there. Do not ask it to manufacture what is not.
A Practical Starting Point
If you are reading this and feeling the weight of AI overwhelm, here is one thing to do today.
Pick one business goal you have been putting off. More consistent video. A blog. Better follow-up emails. Something that would move your business forward if you actually did it.
Then ask: what is the simplest AI workflow that helps me do this specific thing?
Start there. Build muscle memory there. Get good at one thing before you add another.
The professionals who will stand out over the next few years are the ones who got clear on what they had to say, trained their AI to say it in their voice, and showed up consistently with content that served their audience.
The Brand Builder framework was built to give AI a real foundation to work from: your story, your voice, your message. So when you do create, it sounds like you, and not like everyone else.
This post was adapted from Episode 21 of AI After Hours. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Katie Shive
Katie Shive is a personal branding strategist and AI consultant specializing in helping mortgage professionals develop natural, differentiated messaging. Creator of the Brand Builder framework and the GEO Visibility Flywheel, Katie helps loan officers and mortgage industry leaders build personal brands that show up in AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. With over 8 years in the mortgage industry and 15 years in marketing, including 6 years at Guild Mortgage supporting top producers, Katie brings deep industry expertise to her coaching and consulting practice. She is the founder of KS Marketing, host of the AI After Hours podcast and LinkedIn newsletter, and co-host of the Redeeming Her podcast. Based in Kalispell, Montana.
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