Maybe I've been living under a rock, but today I encountered the term "synthetic content" for the first time.
In a world increasingly taken over by AI generated content I suppose it's an appropriate description and I suppose it means that we're now going to have "organic content" and "synthetic content." In the case I ran into, the reference was music generated by AI.
The effectiveness of AI seems to be growing by leaps and bounds, and I listened to some of the music that was labeled as "synthetic", and I was a good 20 minutes into it before I realized that what annoyed me about it was the extent to which it never varied.
It wasn't so much a commentary on the construction of any particular track, it was the fact that all the tracks were virtually identical and I would not have been able to pick a favorite from them.
The music sounded "just OK" and would likely not have bothered me as background in a store or on-hold music, but even so... something was a little "off" about it.
Anyway, I'm not a composer or musician but the experience did leave me thinking about "synthetic content" as it might apply to the world of blogging and other forms of content creation.
I guess the thought I keep mulling over is this idea that I am becoming obsolete. That is to say we are becoming obsolete, as writers; as content creators. I've already been feeling that in my work as an editor... people are increasingly likely to use an AI agent to review their manuscripts, rather than pay someone like me. Besides, more and more manuscripts were "written" by AI, in the first place.
Now, I write because I enjoy the process of writing and turning thoughts into the written word, and the creative process that is associated therewith.
But with that sentiment I'm probably part of a relatively small minority. I remember quite clearly when I was at University that many people would deliberately avoid any courses that had the proverbial "substantial writing component."
With the advent of AI, I feel reasonably certain that those same people — all these years later — are going to choose to use AI to generate their content or work-related writing assignments, rather than doing it themselves.
Which, of course, begs the question of when AI is appropriate and when it is not. Or does "appropriateness" even matter anymore?
In some ways I can't help but feel like it is humans who are pushing AI off in the possibly wrong direction. I think AI would be amazing as a medical diagnostic tool because of its ability to aggregate millions of data points for medical publications with far greater thoroughness than a medical professional. Not suggesting that we're going to replace doctors merely that we're giving them an amazing diagnostic tool.
But having AI takeover our blogging and music seems kind of silly and self-defeating. After all aren't we doing these things in order to express our creativity? And can we truly claim that a machine doing it for us allows us to actually express that creativity?
Besides, I keep returning to ponder of the irony of the fact that we have AI that can write our blog posts, and compose our music, and paint our digital art but I'm missing AI that will do my dishes and fold my laundry! Because that's where I really want some help so I can have free time to do that writing.
But I guess it's going to be a while before we have that.
In the meantime, I'm going to continue with my organic content, thank you very much!
Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2026.02.19 00:45 PST
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