Why Are So Many AI Content Creators Suddenly Going Inactive—and Where Is the AI Content Industry Headed Next?

It’s really quite simple.

Whether in the past, present, or future, everyone only gets 24 hours a day. Once you subtract the time spent eating, sleeping, and absorbing all the negative energy of working life, most people are left with only a few short hours to shake off that corporate funk and recharge with something positive.

Watching short-form dramas, browsing social forums, or looking for erotic images to release some sexual tension costs virtually nothing. So most people vote with their feet: they want to “consume something good.” They are not going to waste their limited and precious free time on a pile of content slop that looks exactly the same whether they see it once or a hundred times.

That is why, no matter how fast content can be produced or how much production efficiency improves, only a tiny handful of top creators will ever capture people’s attention and reap most of the traffic dividends.

AI or no AI, the vast majority of mediocre creators will struggle to attract a large and stable audience, regardless of which tools they use—aside from occasionally producing something bizarre enough to go viral.

In the early days, content production still faced efficiency bottlenecks. Many content-farm accounts could therefore scrape together some of the leftovers from this enormous pool of traffic by making compilation videos, reselling secondhand information, and rewriting other people’s work.

By relying on sheer volume, they could wait for viewers to click by accident and cash in on that traffic before those viewers realized they had been served slop.

AI has dramatically accelerated the production of mediocre work, causing this space to become fiercely competitive almost overnight. The biggest problem is that AI-generated content is far too homogeneous.

With AI-written articles, you often do not even need to read the text. The formatting and the little subheading attached to every paragraph are enough to give them away.

The same is true of AI-generated images: they almost always have that same glossy, greasy-looking aesthetic. Many people still fail to understand that learning to draw is not primarily about learning how to hold a pen—it is about developing taste.

If your aesthetic judgment is poor, your work will look equally tacky whether you use AI or not.

AI-generated short dramas are even worse: everyone’s face looks the same.

If people can tell from the thumbnail alone that something was generated by AI, then it cannot even match the old content farms’ ability to “trick people into clicking first.” Why should anyone waste their precious time on it?

Many people still have a very shallow understanding of how content spreads. They assume that something only needs to “look good enough.” But in reality, more than 80–90% of traffic is captured by content that looks genuinely interesting.

And to be interesting, you must either be astonishingly good, astonishingly bad, or astonishingly absurd.

The bland lump sitting somewhere in the middle has the least future of all.

But once enough people do something impressive, it stops being impressive. Once enough people become absurd, absurdity itself stops feeling absurd.

If you want to remain impressive or absurd, you must keep opening up entirely new territory—and that is obviously no easy task.

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