Let’s draw a line.

I work with a number of clients in the AI space, and I’m personally interested in technology. I read and write about AI on a daily — sometimes hourly — basis.

It’s exciting. It’s impressive. But it’s also increasingly dispiriting, as generative AI begins to erode what little authenticity remains in an already digitised, clickbait-driven, quantity-over-quality online world.

I’m fully supportive of using AI to improve productivity. Who doesn’t want to streamline? And there are advanced, genuinely transformative use cases where AI can improve lives — from safer roads through autonomous vehicles to predicting therapeutic outcomes in early-stage drug trials.

But when generative AI starts replacing thoughtful, considered, human-produced content, I’m out.

No matter how advanced it becomes, AI output is, by definition, unoriginal. And unoriginal is uninteresting.

If book buyers and newspaper readers can no longer trust that the words they’re reading were actually written and considered by the named author, will they stop reading altogether?

If clients can’t be confident that the work delivered by their suppliers is factual, accurate and genuinely considered, will they continue buying?

And when people finally realise that much of what they scroll past on TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook is not only distributed by algorithms, but produced by them, will they simply disengage?

So where do we draw the line?

This is where I draw it: use generative AI to research, to challenge your thinking, even to review your work. But don’t let it generate your ideas, opinions or outputs — especially anything delivered under your name.

If you do, you’re sharing artificial content with the world. And nobody wants to read, watch or listen to that. Trust me.

The problem is that this line is already being crossed. In the pursuit of speed and efficiency, authenticity is quietly being handed over to machines.

The hope is that enough pushback emerges — from readers, clients and audiences — that content producers are forced to listen, slow down, and return to that line in the sand.

If not, do we eventually see a backlash? A cultural reset? A modern, metaphorical Butlerian Jihad against AI-generated noise?

We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ll be deleting TikTok before I’m hit by a wave of Sora-generated videos — and going back to BBC Good Food for my recipes.

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