AI content saturation killed AI content. Human-made is the new premium.

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Welcome to the 219th edition of The Growth Elements Newsletter. Every Monday and sometimes on Thursday, I write an essay on growth metrics & experiments and business case studies.

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Every CMO I speak to scaled AI content production through 2024 and 2025. Output is up 10x.

But today engagement is down 50 to 70%. The lever you pulled to grow content is the same lever that killed your reach.

[1] What happened

LinkedIn engagement on AI-pattern content is down 50 to 70% year over year.

Substack and Beehiiv open rates on AI-drafted newsletters are down 30 to 40%.

B2C engagement on AI-generated social and ad creative is dropping at a similar rate.

Brands that mark content as "written by a human" are getting 3 to 5 times the engagement of AI-pattern equivalents.

Founder LinkedIn accounts publishing 200 hand-written words a day are outperforming corporate accounts publishing 20 polished AI posts.

Audiences trained themselves to filter. The algorithms followed.

[2] Why it happened

AI content has tells. Em dashes. Rule of three. Polished hooks. Generic transitions. Tidy summaries that close every argument. Every reader and every recommendation model learned these patterns in 18 months and started downranking them.

The fix that scaled your output created the saturation that broke your output.

Every B2B SaaS company and every DTC brand pulled the same lever at the same time. The market priced it in. The premium evaporated.

Human-made is the new premium because it is the new scarcity.

[3] What you do about it

Cut volume. Most content teams should publish half of what they currently produce.

Show the hand. Founders write 200 to 400 words a day by themselves, even if rough.

Brands publish behind-the-scenes process, named contributors, specific stories, and proprietary numbers. Photography of real people. Voice notes turned into essays. Original POV that an AI cannot generate.

Edit AI drafts hard or kill them. If a draft comes back with three polished hooks, two tidy transitions, and a generic close, it is not yours.

Rewrite it until it sounds like a human you know wrote it, or scrap it.

Final Words

[1] Audit your last 30 days of social and newsletter content. Mark which posts are AI-pattern and which are original. Compare engagement.

[2] Cut your content calendar volume by 50 percent next quarter. Spend the freed budget on photography, voice notes, and founder writing time.

[3] Add an originality score to your content QA process. If a piece reads like ten other brands could have published it, do not publish it.

That's it for today's article! I hope you found this essay insightful.

Wishing you a productive week ahead!

I always appreciate you reading.

Thanks,
Chintankumar Maisuria