The Great AI Copy-Paste Panic

On prompt bros, borrowed opinions, and the tragedy of becoming faster at sounding like everyone else

Prelude

I am getting dangerously close to losing my mind over the amount of AI hack content showing up on LinkedIn right now, which is saying something because LinkedIn has already survived humblebrag poetry, trauma-marketing cosplay, fake vulnerability essays, and grown adults turning job announcements into hero's journey monologues complete with headshots, a villain arc, and a lesson about resilience that somehow always ends with a link to a free masterclass.

Everywhere I look, someone is dropping another prompt list, carousel, cheat sheet, framework, productivity hack, or breathless little tutorial on how to become better, faster, cleaner, smarter, and more efficient with AI. There are people posting screenshots of their prompts like they discovered fire, wheels, and indoor plumbing in the same afternoon, and the whole thing has started feeling like a digital gold rush where everyone is selling pickaxes to people who have never stopped to ask whether they even want to mine or whether they just wanted to feel like they were moving.

"Everyone is selling pickaxes to people who have never stopped to ask whether they even want to mine."

I use AI, and I want to say that clearly before anyone builds a small effigy of me in the comments section and begins the ceremonial burning, because I am genuinely fascinated by it. I use it every single day to organize thoughts, pressure-test ideas, summarize messy transcripts, explore angles I had not considered, identify the latest winged visitor to my bird garden at six in the morning, and occasionally make sense of whatever strange little thought ferret has been running laps around my brain before the coffee has had time to intervene. I have seen it make my work sharper, faster, and more useful in ways I did not anticipate and am still discovering.

So my concern has never been the tool itself, but what we do with powerful things. Humans have a long and slightly embarrassing history of taking extraordinary tools and immediately turning them into personality substitutes. We did it with social media and personal branding and funnels and content strategy and morning routines, and now we are doing it with AI while convincing ourselves that this time we are all suddenly philosophers with better formatting and a Substack page.

The Tool Is Extraordinary, What We Are Doing With It Is Another Matter Altogether.

The technology is moving fast and it is going to change how we write, learn, build, research, sell, design, and make decisions in ways that genuinely deserve the excitement being directed at them. Anyone still pretending otherwise is probably also waiting for fax machines to make a comeback and has strong opinions about the superiority of physical directories.

What concerns me is how quickly the conversation collapsed into sameness. Somewhere between the legitimate excitement and the inevitable content economy that forms around any legitimate excitement, the tool became less interesting than the ecosystem of people teaching people how to teach people how to use the tool. It feels less like innovation and more like a pyramid scheme wearing noise-canceling headphones and calling itself a thought leadership community.

"The tool became less interesting than the ecosystem of people teaching people how to teach people how to use the tool."

Everyone is suddenly an AI expert with a framework and the prompt that will change your life, your business, your calendar, your metabolism, and possibly your relationship with your dead father if you upgrade to the paid tier. At a certain point the whole thing starts to feel like everyone is regurgitating the same regurgitation with better line spacing and calling it original thinking.

Efficiency Is Not Originality and the Difference Is Everything

The dangerous seduction of AI is that it can make average thinking look polished, which is useful in the short term and quietly corrosive over time. Polished sameness passes for intelligence when everyone is moving too fast to notice the absence of an actual human being underneath it. A post can be articulate, structured, persuasive, and emotionally calibrated while carrying absolutely no blood, no scar tissue, no lived perspective, and no evidence that the person publishing it has wrestled with the idea beyond asking a machine to make it sound authentic and engaging, which remains one of the more embarrassing sentences a person can type and yet here we are.

"Polished sameness passes for intelligence when everyone is moving too fast to notice the absence of an actual human being underneath it."

I want to be honest about something here because the piece earns it and I think you deserve it.

I have felt the pull of this myself, the specific seduction of having a tool that can take a half-formed thought and return it looking considerably more intelligent than the half-formed version deserved to look. There have been moments where I have had to ask myself whether I am using it to sharpen something real or to dress up something that needed more thinking rather than better packaging. That question is uncomfortable in the specific way that useful questions always are, which is how I knew it was the right one to keep asking.

AI did not create our crisis of originality, it revealed it. It showed us how many people were already outsourcing their perspective to whatever sounded smart enough to repeat, how easily we mimic the shape of insight without doing the slower work of forming one, and how desperately most of us want to sound credible and relevant and ahead of the curve even when our own voice is sitting quietly in the corner of the room wondering when it gets invited back into the conversation.

"AI did not create our crisis of originality, it revealed it."

Most people copy because belonging feels safer than originality, because the crowd provides cover, and because a borrowed opinion protects you from the specific risk of being seen clearly enough to be genuinely disagreed with. That is a real risk that costs something real and is worth paying anyway, because the alternative is a version of yourself that keeps getting more efficient and less interesting and one day looks up and cannot remember the last time it said something it actually believed.

"AI can help you say something better, but it cannot give you something worth saying if you have never done the work of figuring out what you actually believe."

The Part No Machine Has Ever Been Able to Do

This is where it comes back to identity, which is where everything eventually comes back to if you follow the thread far enough and are honest enough about what you find when you get there.

The people who build something durable in this next chapter will be the ones who have done enough honest interior work to know what they actually stand for, how they genuinely see the world, what they keep noticing that other people seem to be carefully looking past, and what truth they can articulate in a way that makes someone feel less alone and more awake. That has always been the only thing any piece of writing was ever actually trying to do when it was being honest about its ambitions.

AI can study your tone, shape your ideas, smooth your sentences, and rewrite the same paragraph fourteen times without complaint, which makes it considerably more patient than any human collaborator I have ever worked with and significantly less useful than the ones who tell you the paragraph should be cut rather than polished. What it cannot do is live inside your specific life long enough to notice the strange particular truths that only become visible after you have paid attention to the right things for long enough to become genuinely dangerous with them. That accumulated dangerous attention is the only raw material that produces a perspective worth having, which is the thing too many people are skipping on their way to the output.

"It cannot live inside your specific life long enough to notice the strange particular truths that only become visible after you have paid attention to the right things for long enough to become genuinely dangerous with them."

They want the brand voice without building the self the brand voice is supposed to come from, and so they reach for the tool before doing the work that makes the tool useful rather than just fast. That is how we end up with a LinkedIn feed that is more articulate and less interesting than it has ever been, and this platform has never set a particularly high bar for interesting.

The Question Has Always Been Human

Use the tool the way a surgeon uses a scalpel, with complete respect for what it can do, clear awareness of what it cannot, and an unwavering sense of what you are trying to accomplish before you pick it up. The tool in service of a real perspective is genuinely extraordinary, and the tool as a substitute for one produces content that is smooth and forgettable and increasingly indistinguishable from everything else in the feed. That is the specific tragedy of a moment where differentiation has never mattered more and sameness has never been easier to manufacture.

"The tool in service of a real perspective is genuinely extraordinary. The tool as a substitute for one produces content that is smooth, forgettable, and increasingly indistinguishable from everything else in the feed."

Bring something to the table the machine cannot make. Bring a scar. Bring a question you cannot stop asking. Bring a strange opinion you had to earn through something it cost you to live through. Bring the thing you keep noticing that everyone else seems to be carefully avoiding because it is slightly too honest for a platform where people regularly compare their quarterly revenue growth to summiting Everest in the caption of a professionally lit headshot.

The future belongs to the people who can use the machine without becoming mechanical, who can move faster without becoming thinner, and who have done enough interior work to remain recognizably themselves no matter how sophisticated the imitation gets. That work has always been the real work, the only work that produces something worth distributing in the first place. The tool just made it more urgent by making everything else so much easier to fake.

Use the tool. Protect the thinking. Have an original thought once in a while, because the world is drowning in content and quietly starving for perspective. Those two things are not the same thing and have never been the same thing, and the people who understand the difference are about to become considerably more valuable than they already were.

"The world is drowning in content and quietly starving for perspective. Those two things have never been the same thing."

If this landed somewhere real, reply and tell me what it stirred up. That conversation is always worth having. Deevo, The Brand Storyteller thebrandstoryteller.com

About Deevo

Deevo is a brand strategist, identity architect, and founder of The Brand Storyteller. His work sits at the intersection of psychology, narrative, and strategic clarity, helping founders and executives figure out what they are actually building, who it is actually for, and why so much of their effort feels like it should be compounding faster than it does. He works privately with a small number of people at a time, which is either very intentional or very antisocial depending on who you ask. He does not call himself a coach. If you have read this far, you already know why.

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