WALL-E and the Problem With AI Slop: More Content Isn't Better Content

I was asked recently about establishing a voice for personal branding, like I do for these posts, versus a professional voice for brands.

If you aren't a marketer who has dug deep into how to use AI for this, it can be easy to assume that a single prompt in your platform of choice will churn out 5–10 times as many proposals, content calendars, or articles, and therefore increase revenue by 5–10 times.

This reminded me of a recruiter post I saw last week about candidates using AI to complete the project portion of their applications. Back in 2024 and 2025, some of those submissions looked innovative. Now, the recruiter was frustrated by how easily they could recognize the same cookie-cutter formats, with little evidence that candidates had put any real thought into their work.

Generic prompt in. AI slop out.

I'm not surprised.

One of my favorite articles from my days at Nulogy was titled, "You Don't Need the Latest AI — You Need Better Data." The authorship has since changed but the article was written by me.

If the data AI is using is generic, or consists of just a single prompt, then yeah, the tone and content are going to be generic or cliché. The conclusions will look pretty, but won't have the substance to back them up.

When I completed 30 hours of continuing education for my Professional Certified Marketer (PCM®) certification, specializing in Digital Marketing, back in June, I spent the first eight hours in a live class learning about the best ways to use AI in today's marketing.

I still do most of my own writing, but my dedicated project in ChatGPT has hundreds of hours' worth of video lecture recordings, dozens of writing samples, and strict instructions for how I like to sound in these articles.

It references and updates a content calendar with upcoming topics. I just added a scheduled task on Thursdays to look at trending topics so I can determine whether the content for the following week should be updated.

Now imagine your marketing is done by a little robot like WALL-E.

Same task, day in and day out: compress large amounts of trash into small cubes. Then stack those cubes.

No judgment on topic shifts. No willingness to push back on management when they suggest a color change. Instant agreement with no personal stake in whether the content will move the needle for sales.

So what's the difference between my personal voice and a professional one?

One word: experience.

Experience is what gives content its perspective. It's knowing your audience, understanding what makes your brand different, and recognizing when something sounds good but doesn't actually say anything. AI can help organize ideas, challenge assumptions, and speed up production, but it can't replace the judgment that comes from doing the work. Otherwise, we're just asking WALL-E to make more cubes, stacking them higher, and calling it a content strategy.