Mirror mirror on the wall, analyze this blog article I just wrote. Increase it’s chances of success by making it easier to digest for my audience. Trim it to a maximum of 1500 words and then find or create sentences you can use to incorporate the following six keywords of interest to my audience. Give me five different ideas for blog articles I can write based on this one. Make sure the ideas can incorporate the same six keywords…
Spoiler alert, chances are you are going to get a perfectly trim article with the right keywords and can be read in 7 minutes or under. Do this a few times and you begin to see running your creations through an AI filter produces the same kind of ‘vibe’. This ‘vibe’ is simply an 8th grade reading level as determined by a large language model in a giant power-sucking data center.
According to the 2024-2025 National Literacy Institute statistics, most Americans (54%) have a 6th grade reading level or below. Shout out to New Hampshire for being the state with the highest number of literate adults!
It’s been common practice for years for marketers and content writers to write with an 8th grade reading level because it’s a good compromise and allows for some specialization. However; before the arrival of AI, a professional writer’s interpretation of an 8th grade reading level could still have more of a creative complexity. I’m just not seeing this in AI’s interpretations of the same reading level.
Most AI generated content seems more like what I would have thought a six grade level would be a few years ago. I have received better results from AI if you have it start with a more advanced piece of original writing than if you ask it to generate something from scratch on its own. But it just doesn’t feel like a good long term solution.
I can’t help but wonder, if AI pats itself on the back generating sub-par 6th grade; I mean 8th grade content which performs with other AI tools, what space will there be for more sophisticated writing? What does it mean for human mind when it can no longer be challenged by words in everyday life situations? I’m still working out why exactly, but contemplating this idea makes me a little sad.
The algorithms are eating this level of writing up everywhere behind the scenes too, not just with AI prompts. Mailchimp recommends 6th grade level in its helper tools, the popular SEO tool I’ve used on WordPress sites for years, All In One SEO, scores your meta data based on an 8th grade writing analysis.
Now in 2025, we’re starting to see robots rank robot content. In many cases robot generated content is ranking successfully within the robot run algorithms. It’s a bit of gold rush now for SEO professionals who are figuring out all the new ways to use these tools to rank in traditional search results, AI results, and local search results.
I remember back in 2016 with the Google Penguin 4.0 update, the algorithm went heavy on punishing duplicate content. For now, AI search results don’t seem to care about duplicate content as much, but this will change when users demand more quality results from their robot servants. I suspect over time, big tech will need to introduce more quality control measures.
So what is the antidote to this ‘AI generated slop’. The pessimist in me says, there is none. People never actually cared where their content came from, or if it was original. They just want convenience and dopamine. If a business has a unique value proposition (UVP) and a robot connected to a big enough data center can present your UVP at the exact time the customer needs it, what does it matter?
If everyone in the world has an eight grade reading level, wouldn’t it just mean we could spend less time reading and more time prompting?
The optimist in me says, naa, this is a phase. I believe the future is in zero-party data. This is the kind of high-performing data about your clients you collect and horde yourself. Content specialization and customer relationships are going to be paramount to success. Unregulated AI will create an increasingly more paranoid world and businesses who focus on consumer trust will win using much smaller, much more qualified audiences.
As usual, I prefer the optimist version of me. AI writing is here to stay, but it will remain a valuable tool not a replacement for quality, original writing. I suspect it will take a great deal more effort for great writers to find their qualified audiences, but in the end AI will probably prove valuable for this too.