AI Didn't Make Your Marketing Beige. Your Approval Process Did.
Why so much content feels like "AI slop," and how marketing leaders can get back to work that actually helps the reader.
Open LinkedIn and scroll for about thirty seconds. I'll wait.
You probably saw something like this: "In today's fast-paced landscape, leaders must navigate unprecedented change." Insert your own jargon as you like…Then a list of five tips, each starting with an emoji. Then a post announcing that something is "not just a tool, it's a mindset." Then three more that could have been written by the same person. They may have been. Or at least by the same prompt.
There's a name for this now: AI slop. Content that's technically fine, grammatically perfect and completely forgettable. And the conversation about it has gotten loud. Marketing Week recently reported that AI use among marketers has reached 96%, and the trade press is full of worry that we're all drifting into the same "beige" middle.
So the verdict seems clear: AI is making marketing bland.
I'd like to offer a different theory.
Beige was here first
After more than 20 years in B2B marketing, I can tell you that bland content is not a new invention. We were making plenty of it long before anyone typed a prompt.
Remember the press release with four executive quotes that all said "we're thrilled"? The website headline that went through so many reviews it ended up saying "blah blah blah solutions for a changing world"? The thought leadership piece where every interesting sentence got "softened" until it said nothing at all?
AI didn't create beige. AI just made beige faster, easier and cheaper to produce. It held up a mirror, and a lot of us didn't love what we saw.
Which means the fix isn't to use less AI. It's to fix the two things that were producing bland content all along: no clear direction, no real intent to help the reader, no specified value offered.
What slop really is
Here's my working definition: slop is content that was made to exist, not made to help.
You can usually spot it because nobody can answer two simple questions about it:
Who, specifically, is this for? ("Marketing leaders" doesn't count. "A VP of marketing whose CFO just cut her budget by 15%" does.)
What will they do differently after reading it?
When those answers are fuzzy, the content is fuzzy. Hand a fuzzy brief to AI and you get fuzzy content at scale, beautifully formatted. Hand the same brief to a talented writer and, honestly, you often get the same thing, just slower.
The tool was never the problem. The missing direction was.
How beige gets made
Now for the part nobody likes to talk about. Even when a piece starts with a clear point of view, it often doesn't survive the trip to "approved." Here's how a sharp idea gets sanded down, one reasonable edit at a time:
Reviewer 1: "Can we soften this? It might sound negative."
Reviewer 2: "We should mention all three product lines so nobody feels left out."
Reviewer 3: "Legal flagged 'proven.' Let's say 'designed to help.'"
Reviewer 4: "This example is a little specific. Can we make it more general?"
Reviewer 5: "Looks great!" (It no longer says anything.)
Every single edit was sensible. Each one removed a small risk. Together, they removed the reason anyone would read it.
That's the beige machine. And AI plugs right into it: generate a safe draft, run it through the same reviews, and you get blandness on an industrial scale.
How to protect the edges
The good news: this is a leadership problem, which means leaders can fix it. Five moves that make a real difference:
1. Write the reader promise before anyone writes a word. One sentence: "After reading this, [specific reader] will be able to [specific thing]." If you can't finish the sentence, you're not ready to write, with or without AI.
2. Let AI be the engine, not the author. AI is brilliant at research, structure, first drafts and versioning. It's not the one who decides what you believe. Use it to go faster, then add the part only you can add: your perspective, your experience, your proof.
3. Approve for risk, not for comfort. Give every reviewer a clear job. Legal checks for legal risk. Product checks for accuracy. Nobody gets to sand down the point of view because it feels a little bold. "I'd say it differently" is not a required change.
4. Keep one sentence someone could disagree with. If nobody could possibly push back on anything in the piece, it's not thought leadership. It's wallpaper.
5. Include something only you have. A real example, a number from experience, a mistake you learned from, a customer story. AI can't make these up (well, it can, and that's a different problem). They're what makes content worth reading.
The helpfulness test
Before anything goes out the door, run it past these five questions:
Question | If the answer is no... |
Could I name the one reader this is for? | Narrow the audience before you edit another word. |
Will they know what to do next? | Add a clear takeaway, step or question. |
Is there one idea someone could disagree with? | Find the sentence you softened and put it back. |
Is there something only we could have written? | Add an example, a number or a story. |
Would I stop scrolling for this? | Be honest. Then start over if you need to. |
It takes about two minutes, and it'll catch more slop than any AI detector.
Enterprise vs. mid-market
For enterprise teams, the beige machine is usually the approval chain. More stakeholders means more sanding. Try a simple rule: two reviewers for risk and accuracy, one owner for the point of view. Everyone else gets to read it after it's published, like the rest of the world.
For mid-market teams, the risk is different. You have fewer approvers, but also fewer hands, so it's tempting to let AI fill the calendar. Resist it. Two genuinely helpful pieces a month will do more for your brand than twenty forgettable ones. Small teams win on sharpness, not volume.
Bland isn't safe. It's invisible.
Here's the irony. Every softening edit is made in the name of safety. But in a feed full of content that all sounds the same, bland is the riskiest choice you can make. Nobody complains about beige content. Nobody remembers it, either.
The brands that will stand out in the next few years won't be the ones that avoided AI. They'll be the ones that used it to go faster and still had the nerve to say something useful, specific and a little bit brave.
So the next time a draft lands on your desk, skip "Is this on brand?" for a moment and ask the better question:
"Does this actually help anyone?"
If the answer is yes, protect it from the beige machine. If it's no, no amount of editing (human or AI) will save it.
Your turn: What's the one edit your approval process always makes that you secretly disagree with?
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