The exact moment your content becomes "supermarket noise"

Yesterday, I was researching a client project and had to slog through 23 articles about 'workflow management' in a particular industry. Read some parts, skimmed others. Here's what struck me: I could have written 22 of them with ChatGPT in under 30 minutes.

Same buzzwords, similar structure, same predictability. Generic insights recycled endlessly.

If AI could have written your article, it already belongs in the bookmark graveyard. It's already dead.

Shelves that never empty

Picture a supermarket where workers restock every aisle every sixty seconds. Boxes pile six deep, labels blur, and shoppers leave empty-handed. Most marketing teams respond by jamming in even more boxes (e.g., publishing daily tips, repurposed threads, recycled webinars) because KPIs reward output, not uptake.

More than 54 percent of long-form LinkedIn posts are now AI-generated. Readers scroll past hundreds of headlines before lunch. Algorithms re-blend yesterday's text into today's déjà vu. The shelves of the Internet supermarket refill in minutes, not days.

Each extra carton hides the one behind it. Activity climbs, recall sinks.

Retrieval, not quality, is the kill switch

Pieces usually die after they're saved. In a 2020** study, users revisited only 16 percent of their own bookmarks. Last month, while attending a client call, I watched a marketing director frantically search her 150 saved articles for 'that piece about customer retention.' Twenty minutes later, she gave up and Googled it instead.

Later, she texted that the article she'd bookmarked three weeks earlier was buried on page 12 of her saves, invisible and useless.

Here's what content strategists won't admit: your best-performing post last month will be completely forgotten by Christmas. Not because it was bad. Because it was forgettable.

Why AI Can't Fake Bruises

The lone surviving signal is a detail a robot cannot fake.

1. Logistics scar. A supply-chain engineer once posted the exact SAP error code (and the six weird steps that fixed it) that stranded her shipment. Practitioners forwarded the link across Slack within hours.
2. Sameness flop. AA SaaS firm tripled output with daily "workflow optimisers," each clone of the last. Traffic flat-lined. Average read time dropped 42 percent, according to the content manager. Quantity multiplied obscurity.

And the reason? Large language models predict plausible next words from the public text. They can mimic warmth and cadence but cannot invent the bruises insiders recognise.

Memory science backs you up

Psychologists call this the von Restorff effect: when people encounter a stream of similar items, the lone outlier gets stamped as important and stored for later. Your hippocampus (the part of the brain primarily involved in forming new associations and connections) literally flags the oddball for priority processing while normal items are demoted to junk. Sameness is biologically tuned for oblivion. Distinctiveness sticks.

I worked with a client a couple of months back, where we got the opportunity to test two LinkedIn posts about productivity. Post A: 'Five ways to optimise your workflow.' Post B: 'The 11:47 PM Slack message that saved my startup.' Post B got 140% more saves and 6x more forwards.

And I'm sure you can figure out why. The hippocampus—part of the brain's limbic system essential for memory and learning—flags oddball details like that specific timestamp for priority storage while generic advice gets dumped.

Litmus test before you publish

1. Could an LLM plausibly output this paragraph? If yes, dig until the answer flips. Surface the invoice line, the debug string, and the lived misstep.
2. Will a practitioner quote one line aloud tomorrow? If not, embed a brain tattoo that won't fade: a dollar figure, a two-word metaphor, a face-palm moment.
3. Does the piece end on one concrete next step? Action wires ideas into muscle memory. Theory alone evaporates.

Create your draft like this

Delete every sentence that merely says obvious things (e.g. "content is noisy," "attention is scarce," or "quality matters.") Those are bland truths. Keep only material that proves, extends, or illustrates the big claim: copy-paste content equals death.

Make a table:

I call it sharpening without shouting. No click-bait or ALL-CAPS required. Sharpness lives in precision, not volume. Write the CIO's exact Slack line when the budget blew. Describe the exact error code, timestamp, and sensory detail. Gift the reader a fingerprint a machine can't forge.

Isn't this just a new formula?

Here's the thing. Specificity can't become formulaic because real specificity is unique to your experience. The SAP error code that saved that supply-chain engineer's shipment isn't replicable. Your 2 AM breakthrough moment isn't copyable. The exact words your biggest client said when they almost walked away are yours alone!

When everyone tries to fake specificity, real practitioners can spot the difference immediately. Authentic scars can't be manufactured at scale. (And believe me, people try.)

Specificity ≠ breaking confidentiality

And for those in regulated industries thinking, "I can't share client details or error codes due to compliance", you're absolutely right. But specificity doesn't require confidentiality breaches.

Instead of the exact client name, use "the Fortune 500 manufacturer." Instead of the actual error code, describe "the three-word error message that stumped our entire dev team for six hours." The principle remains: find the unfakeable detail within your constraints. There's always something specific you can share without crossing compliance lines.

So what survives?

In an economy of infinite supply and shrinking attention, a piece endures when it:

1. Offers un-fakeable specificity (the bruise). Lived experience details prove the author has skin in the game. Readers trust skin, not spin.
2. Embeds a retrieval hook (the tattoo). A sticky phrase, odd metaphor, or single jaw-dropping stat turns the article into mental graffiti the brain can't throw away.
3. Closes with an executable step (the cash-out). A clear next move converts curiosity into behaviour, giving the insight a foothold in daily work.

Everything else is louder, longer, prettier. It's all supermarket noise.

This approach is slower upfront. But here's what most content teams miss: one piece with genuine scar tissue gets shared, quoted, and referenced for months. Those 22 AI-generated articles I could have written in 10 minutes? They'll be forgotten by next Tuesday.

The math is compelling: half the output can yield ten times the shelf life. Content calendar pressure drives many publishing decisions. Yet there's a fundamental trade-off between quantity that fades quickly and quality that endures for months.

One-week experiment

This week, audit your last five articles. For each one, ask: 'Could I have generated this with three ChatGPT prompts?' If yes, find one detail only you know. The exact error message. The 2 AM realisation. The client's verbatim objection. Rewrite that section with your scar tissue showing. Then watch which version people actually quote in meetings. Publish two versions:

A: polished but clone-able.

B: half the length, twice the scar tissue.

The logistics engineer's SAP post proves which one reader emailed back. My bet: B wins on forwards and verbatim quotes, even if impressions are lower. People still push past a thousand identical boxes to grab the single label a machine can't copy.

Because if ChatGPT could have written it, the Save-and-Forget Cemetery already has a plot reserved.

**And yes, that 2020 bookmark study predates our current AI explosion. But bookmark behaviour has gotten worse. Because the flood of similar content makes finding that one valuable piece even harder. Think about your own bookmarks folder. When was the last time you actually went back to find something specific?