Field notes
I ran AI content further than anyone sensible would
Under the name Oliver Ahn I built a publishing pipeline and pushed it to full novel length, over and over, at my own expense. Not to prove it could be done. To find out exactly where it falls apart.
Five Lessons
- The decline is invisible while it happens. Quality does not fall off a cliff, it sags. Read any thousand words and they seem fine. Read forty pages and everything sounds the same.
- It defaults to the middle of the road. Left alone the model writes the most average version of anything. For a service page that is fatal.
- Generation stops being the bottleneck immediately. Editing becomes the whole job. Anyone pricing on how fast they can produce pages is pricing the part that turned out to be free.
- It cannot know your business. The details that make a local page rank are the ones only you have.
- Volume with no reason to exist is worth nothing. I can produce a book a week. That does not make a book worth reading.
What That Means
I use AI in client work. I am specific about where: research, first drafts, structured data, the tedious middle of a technical audit. I do not use it to fill your site with pages, because I have seen precisely what that produces at volume and I would not sell it to you.
The books themselves are comedies, and they are not for everyone. They live at oliverahn.com if you are curious.