Everything's Fake Now

We’re all just walking through it pretending not to notice.

There’s an AI toothbrush now.

Not one that brushes your teeth with AI. One that tracks your brushing and sends the data to an app so you can receive personalised insights about your molars.

Your toothbrush generates a report. Your toothbrush has opinions about your technique. Your toothbrush is disappointed in you.

This is where we are.

Everything is being filled with AI-generated bollocks at a pace I can barely comprehend. Articles that read like they were written by someone who learned English last Tuesday by reading a dictionary. Books on Amazon with five-star reviews from accounts created three minutes ago with similar names. LinkedIn posts that all sound identical because they were all made by the same prompt that someone sold as a course for £497.

I searched for a recipe last week…

Typed “how to cook risotto” into Google. First result was 4,000 words about the history of rice, the emotional journey of the author’s grandmother, and seventeen paragraphs about stirring before finally getting to the actual instructions, which were wrong.

The whole thing was written by a bot. You can tell because no human would write “As we navigate the culinary landscape of Italian cuisine, it’s worth noting that risotto occupies a unique space in the pantheon of beloved dishes.”

No one talks like that. No one thinks like that. But the bot doesn’t know that, so it keeps pumping out articles that sound like a GCSE student trying to hit a word count.

Amazon is worse. Search for any book about productivity, marketing, or AI itself and you’ll find 400 titles that are just slightly different arrangements of the same five words.

“AI For Business Growth Strategy.”

“Business Growth Strategy Using AI.”

“Strategy For AI Business Growth.”

All written by bots. All sold to people who’ll add them to their Kindle library and never open them. The reviews are written by bots. The author bio is probably written by a bot. The whole ecosystem is just bots talking to bots while someone in the middle takes £8.99 per transaction.

LinkedIn is having a full breakdown. Every third post is now someone who’s discovered ChatGPT and thinks they’ve unlocked the secret to viral content. They all follow the same structure. They all use the same phrases. They all end with a question designed to harvest comments from other people who also just discovered ChatGPT.

“I used to spend 6 hours writing one post. Now I spend 6 minutes. Here’s my framework.”

The framework is typing words into a box and pressing enter. Revolutionary stuff. Absolutely groundbreaking. They’ve cracked the code. The code was already cracked. Everyone’s using it. That’s why everything sounds the same.

There are people selling courses on how to use AI to create courses to sell to people who want to learn how to use AI to create courses. It’s a pyramid scheme but somehow legal because the product is information about how to sell information.

I saw someone advertising “10,000 Canva templates powered by AI” last month. Ten thousand. Who needs ten thousand templates? What are you making? If you’re creating content that requires ten thousand different templates, you’re not a creator, you’re a factory.

The images are the worst part. Every stock photo site is now flooded with AI-generated pictures of people who don’t exist, smiling in offices that don’t exist, holding tablets that are displaying completely unreadable text because the AI doesn’t understand words yet.

But they’re cheap. Cheaper than hiring a photographer. Cheaper than buying real stock photos. So now every article about business success has the same image of a person in a blazer pointing at a graph that makes no sense, and they have seven fingers because the AI got confused halfway through rendering their hand.

No one checks anymore. Why would they? The article was written by AI, illustrated by AI, and uploaded by someone who’s managing forty other websites exactly like it.

Quality control would slow down the slop pipeline.

I got an email last week from someone offering to write SEO articles for my website. 500 words for a fiver. Any topic. 24-hour turnaround. I asked how that was possible.

“We use advanced AI tools to streamline the content creation process while maintaining high editorial standards.”

They use ChatGPT and they don’t read it before sending it. That’s the streamlined process. The high editorial standards are checking that it’s definitely 500 words.

The internet is being paved over with generated slop and we’re all just walking through it pretending not to notice. Google doesn’t care because the slop is stuffed with keywords, feeds their AI and loads quickly. Amazon doesn’t care because the books have titles and prices and that’s enough. LinkedIn doesn’t care because engagement is engagement, even if it’s all bots commenting on bot posts.

We’ve built a system that rewards quantity over quality so heavily that quality is now a competitive disadvantage. If you spend time writing something good, you’re losing to the person who spent three minutes generating forty mediocre things.

The toothbrush didn’t need AI. The articles didn’t need to exist. The books will never be read. The courses teach nothing. The templates will never be used. But they’ll keep getting made because making them costs nothing and stopping requires someone to care.

No one’s stopping anytime soon.

My toothbrush is writing a report about my gums while you read this.