The state of the field in one sentence: marketing is splitting into two halves that cannot share a strategy.
The slop half
AI-generated landing pages, AI-generated emails, AI-generated thought leadership. Volume is up 100x and trust is down by roughly the same. Anyone running this playbook is in a race against the next hundred thousand people running the same one. The marginal cost of content is approaching zero and so is the marginal value.
This is not a moral objection. It is an operator one. Slop works on Tuesday and stops working by Friday because everyone with a credit card now has it.
The craft half
Brands that decided to be recognizably made by humans. Slower output. Stronger trust. A smaller funnel at the top, much higher conversion at the bottom. The economics work because conversion compounds where attention does not.
You can tell when a piece of writing has a real person behind it. So can your audience. The shape of the prose, the specific weird example, the willingness to hedge — those are the tells. None of them are produced well by current models on their own.
Why the strategies cannot coexist
You cannot be the high-volume AI shop and the craft brand at the same time. The audiences sniff each other out in about a minute. Try to do both and the slop half eats the craft half from inside — once you have a content engine that outputs ten posts a day, you stop being able to defend the one that took six hours.
Pick one. If you do not pick, the market picks for you, and it picks slop — because slop is what most people in the room are quietly defaulting to.
Where I might be wrong
There is a real argument that a small number of operators will pull off “scaled craft” by using AI as a multiplier on a real human voice. Train it on your writing, let it draft, edit hard, ship. I think the people who can actually do that will be rarer than they think, because the editing skill required is itself a craft most marketers do not have. But I will be watching closely.
I picked craft. I think it is the right bet for the next five years. Ask me again in two.