A few months ago I wrote about the Piss Average problem, a term I coined to describe the phenomenon of the Internet being filled with the average, mediocre work created by genAI until every major platform becomes saturated and poisoned by it. I named it after the literal yellowing of images generated by ChatGPT—which sadly seems to have been fixed, and most have probably forgotten about this quirk by now.

I wrote that one of the biggest, existential issues with genAI is the crisis of faith—having no idea if the work you're looking at was produced by a person or an LLM. Eventually, this calcifies into a vigilant paranoia and questioning anything that's too standardized, too neat and tidy. I've gone on record saying this lack of trust is an awful way to interface with the web, creativity, and art as a whole. A compulsive, gnawing knowing.

Luckily, I've found that as time goes on, this is by-and-large a non-issue in most of the Internet I inhabit. There are really only a few platforms where I see obviously genAI cookie-cutter content: LinkedIn, Meta ads, and Medium.

LinkedIn, I think, would be a surprise to nobody. There has always been an uncanny, hollow culture on the platform driven by the worst impulses of late-stage capitalism. People are dedicated to maximizing reach and leverage, especially if they're unemployed and in sincere financial need for a job. Jobseekers would rightly do and say anything that might boost their chances. A 2024 study by Originality.AI analyzing nearly nine thousand long-form LinkedIn posts found that as of late 2024, over half were likely AI-generated. By 2025 that number was still holding, spread across industries from tech to healthcare to finance. The same study found that genAI posts received 45% less engagement than human-written ones.

Meta is a little more interesting, since I've completely stopped seeing genAI images or videos except for advertisements. And these are always awful—low-quality renders with uncanny skin, monotone voicework, and swimming with artifacts. In 2024 alone, more than 15 million ads were created using Meta's AI tools by over a million advertisers worldwide. It befuddles me. It seems as though genAI ads deliver ROI lifts. But a higher click-through rate on a visually debased product is still spam with better aim. The difference between a phishing email that works and a phishing email that doesn't. The metric succeeded and the commons became uglier. The entire platform (and the Internet, of course) would be far better off if AI-generated advertising were banned outright.

But Medium? That's the most disheartening. Despite having a clear AI content policy, I have seen people time and time again violate and offend. It's one thing to use genAI imagery throughout your article—this is allowed, argued as supplementary garnish to the writing. Regardless, it is in poor taste. But it is another thing entirely to write articles with genAI.

Even worse is when I get vague, pseudo-intellectual comments rife with em-dashes and the same robotic colloquialisms cycling through like a washing machine. Maybe it's because I've been working with genAI since GPT-2 in late 2019, but the smells are strong and obvious. I'm going to share a few examples, names redacted:

There's a particular kind of quiet that comes after writing out a truth I was too scared to say out loud, and I've found that rhythm and meter often bridge the gap where ordinary logic fails.

Sir, this piece on loss is profoundly moving and deeply human. I was struck by the honesty in your words and the quiet strength that runs through the narrative. You've captured grief not just as pain, but as something layered, lingering, and strangely reflective. The way you revisit loss without exaggeration makes it even more powerful. It feels intimate, almost like a conversation with memory itself. Your writing carries a rare emotional depth that stays with the reader long after finishing. I truly appreciate the sensitivity and clarity you've brought to such a difficult and universal experience.

Beautifully written, there's a quiet honesty here that makes "home" feel deeper than a place. It captures belonging, memory, and identity in a way that lingers after reading.

In truth, out of everything, this is the most heartbreaking to see. Do you see what I mean?

Perfectly calibrated warmth. The brief feeling of being understood without understanding anything. I've seen people write about their divorce, their late mother, or a home that can't be returned to. And the machine replies and says "rare emotional depth."

I write this with as much urgent honesty as I can muster: You can write your own 50-word comment. I promise! You do not need the aid of a machine to do so. I would always rather see unpolished, clunky writing full of typos by a human over the sanitized, safe, predictable writing generated from a chatbot LLM. You will always, always end up creating something more interesting on your own.

Maybe I'm being naïve and these comments are from dystopian content farms and mass-writing factories where words are churned out at the rate of millions for a few cents. But I really want to believe that there are still people here who ought to be writing from the heart, and they know it.

The IndieWeb

Thankfully, I do not run into this issue at all on the IndieWeb. There is a reason why it's called the human web. There was a forum thread recently on 32-Bit Café discussing comment culture started by the talented Nori Jammy, and my response there prompted me to start writing this article in the first place:

My site currently has 59 comments in total, which means I have around ~0.3 comments per post I write. You do need your own site with IndieAuth rel links to comment though. My guestbook has about two dozen entries. In contrast, I get hundreds of comments on Medium, but the problem is a lot seem genAI or really superficial and hollow at the very least. Medium has a similar problem to YouTube, where there’s an incentive to comment, but on Medium it’s more increasing engagement/reach rather than social clout and having others consider you funny. So, I greatly value the smaller amount of comments on my site. I think I run into a bit of a similar problem when I try to comment on other people’s things. I don’t want to be generic or superficial, so I try to comment only if I have something genuine to say.

I remember fifteen years ago, I was posting photography on deviantART and poetry on WordPress. The comments were often shorter, but unmistakably human. dA built a culture, documented and celebrated, where simple comments like "cool!" were actually frowned upon. People wanted in-depth feedback, constructive criticism, the full force of someone else's attention. Artist Loish Van Baarle, one of the platform's great successes, noted that by the 2019 era this quality of conversation was "disappearing on the big social-media platforms." And that was before the bots, before the AI image generators colonized the recommendations, before the platform that launched so many real artistic careers began promoting bulk-generated avatars from accounts with fabricated follower counts. The comment culture of dA was specific, earnest, and irreplaceable.

So, you might think you're off the hook, right? Wrong! I am calling on the webweavers and webcrafters of the IndieWeb to write more comments, just as I am asking the silo'd web to write less (or at least more human ones). Reach out and give your two cents.

Understand that what I said above applies just the same to you. You have a voice and a unique life experience. You and your thoughts and opinions matter. It is not adding slop to an endless void—that is what the genAI writing is. By writing and sharing your human, from-the-heart work and art, you are actively resisting. You are tipping the scales back towards humanity. And that matters. People want to hear you. At least, I do.

Good stuff bubbles up! 🫧

Now, you might be scratching your head figuring out where to start with sending a comment. Good news: along with the many different IndieWeb directories, there's a new platform called Bubbles.Town that acts like a HackerNews for non-technical blogs and articles. There are currently 5,120 independent, personal blogs on their front page, ranked by votes and freshness. The only way a platform like this survives and thrives is by people. The more voting and participation, the more curated picks there can be. There is already a wonderful daily briefing featuring blog posts on the topics of arts, crafts, culture, film & TV, life, food, gaming, history, music, nature, politics, science, tech, and of course, writing.

Letter Culture

This isn't just about comments, either.

One of my favourite subjects in literature is epistolary work, which is just a fancy word for letter writing. Letters are as old as civilization itself. Humans have always needed to reach across distance and press their voice into someone else's hand.

The ancient world's postal systems of Mesopotamian clay tablets, Egyptian papyrus scrolls, and the Roman cursus publicus with its relay horses and staging posts, were the nervous system of empires.

Seneca wrote in the first century CE that "letters should be handled like sacred things. They are the voice of absent friends and the bond of goodwill between people separated by distance." That's still true today. The Vindolanda tablets, discovered near Hadrian's Wall in 1973, contain birthday party invitations and personal notes and military orders, all preserved in wood. The mundane made sacred by time, the ordinary voice of ordinary people calling across two thousand years of silence.

The epistolary tradition ran forward through Cicero's voluminous correspondence, through Paul's (sometimes forged) letters to the early churches, through Abélard and Héloïse, through the great letter-writers of the Enlightenment, through the correspondence of everyone who has ever been separated from someone they loved and had no other recourse but to put words on a surface and trust that the surface would travel. The structure of modern email—greeting, body, closing—descends directly from Greco-Roman epistolary convention. We are still writing the same letter.

Email existed before the World Wide Web. It will outlast the algorithmic feed. One of the most lovely things I get in my inbox is a personalized email written by a fellow webcrafter and blogger on the IndieWeb. A response to something I've written or just a hello.

You have nothing to lose by emailing someone your thoughts. The worst case is they don't respond. The best case is you have a new friend. A real connection to another human, made in one of the oldest ways we have.

Our Dionysian Impulse

As we voyage further into the machinery of billionaire-funded, RAM-devouring data centres and impossible capital valuations, we shall find ourselves drawn to the messy, raw, and skewed. Mistakes are revered, becoming gravitational.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who I've written about before, gave us a framework explaining this in The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

He distinguished between two fundamental artistic impulses. The Apollonian, named for the god of order, light, and reason—structured, formal, dreamlike in its coherence, imposing form on the chaos of experience; and the Dionysian, named for the god of wine and ecstasy—chaotic, passionate, dissolving the borders of individual selfhood into something larger and more primal. Nietzsche saw that Western culture, since Socrates, has been systematically biased toward the Apollonian. Toward the ordered, the rational, the individuated, all at the expense of vitality. Art that only dreams, never intoxicates, becomes what he called "corpselike." I do not think Nietzsche could have anticipated that Apollonian culture would best run on NVIDIA chips.

WGSN's recent fashion analysis for A/W 2026/27 coined the "Renaissance of Real." Designers are leaning into visible stitching, raw-edge tailoring, and construction lines deliberately unhidden. The maker's hand, once concealed behind immaculate finishing, is now a point of value. Fashionista reported that "shoppers are increasingly drawn to pieces that feel human: visibly worked, slightly imperfect and rich with story and process." Prada staged what Miuccia called "a reaction to the first season of artificial intelligence." Tod's ran an "Artisanal Intelligence" campaign showcasing the hands of its craftspeople. Design observers are calling this response to AI homogenization "algorithmic sameness." We have visual fatigue. Every output, trained on the same data, clusters around the same soft gradients, the same balanced compositions, the same piss-average geometry.

"Perfection is increasingly no great distinguisher." When AI can generate beautiful in seconds, beautiful stops meaning anything. Charli XCX, for example, understood this. Brat's cover with the aggressively unfinished, visually unpleasant green was a wonderful Dionysian act.

Generative AI is the most Apollonian technology ever built. Trained on the totality of what humans have expressed, the only thing that can be created is the statistical centre of that expression, the mean of all our voices. It generates beautiful, coherent, structured outputs, but it cannot intoxicate. It cannot write a letter that makes someone sob on a subway platform. It produces the dream without the drunkenness, form without rapture, the beautiful illusion with nothing beneath it.

The Dionysian is rising. Suppression always creates pressure. The messy typo-ridden comment, raw-edge blazer, threads left hanging, chicken-scratch. Symptoms of cultural immune response. The body of human creativity rejecting the mechanical transplant.

The Internet, at its best, is a Dionysian project. Chaotic, border-dissolving, weirdly intimate, full of people finding each other across vast distances. Pressing strange, specific voices into the dark.

Data centres will never be able to generate you. The words you'd actually type, imperfectly, into a comment box because you experienced something moving. Write and send that comment.