Behind the curtain of rampant automation and endless venture capital, a dangerous instability is growing. A bubble about to pop, resoundingly. The biggest names in AI are built on a model that is burning through billions of dollars with no clear path to profit.
This isn’t hype; it’s fact, based on real evidence. The bot-coms are making promises they can’t keep, and the entire system is showing signs of rot.
Most of you know I have been reluctant to jump on board the AI-generative properties train, and I will remain 100% cautious about adopting this stuff simply because of social hysteria. No, I’m not ranting, “AI is evil; we’re all going to perish.” I’m also never going to write a fawning love letter to new tech. For me, it’s better to look, understand, try, evaluate, and decide for myself based on critical thinking, not on emotion or peer pressure.
There’s a growing groundswell shift from “Human creativity will be destroyed by AI” to “AI is a miracle that can write all my material, and no one will ever know.” Writers are looking a lot like lemmings.
Lemmings are furry little critters that live in tundra areas of the Northern Hemisphere. There’s a common myth that these little guys commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs—they don’t. Still, we all understand that acting like lemmings is a simile for blindly following the group. It’s herd mentality.
In a personal quest to plow through the noise and find the signal, I’ve become familiar with a concept known as the “rot economy,” hypothesized by PR mogul Ed Zitron. The theory explains a lot about what is probably happening in the artificial intelligence generating space, and writers, actually, all creative workers, would do well to digest all this and make a strategic plan.
My new white paper is designed to put you ahead of the crowded writing field, leaving you prepared for the consequences.
Why would the rot economy concern mature writers like us?
For mature writers, our greatest assets are years of honed craft, deep subject matter expertise, and a finely tuned authentic voice. The “AI rot economy” presents a direct threat to the value of these assets by promising a shortcut to content creation. And people are buying into it without understanding what it is.
This is particularly concerning because many writers in our demographic have lived through previous tech bubbles, like the dot-com crash, and recognize the pattern: immense hype, astronomical valuations for companies with no profits, and an eventual, painful market correction. The risk is not just about being replaced by a machine; it’s about investing finite time, energy, and capital into building skills and workflows around platforms that are themselves built on a precarious financial foundation.
Betting one’s business on a “ticking time bomb” is a strategic error we are experienced enough to want to avoid.
The business model of this rot economy relies on flooding the digital space with massive quantities of “good enough” content, which devalues the very currency a seasoned writer trades in: authority, nuance, and trust. When the internet becomes an even noisier environment saturated with generic, AI-generated text, it becomes exponentially harder for the signal of true expertise to cut through the noise.
This forces mature writers into a draining battle for visibility, not based on the quality of their ideas, but against the sheer volume of artificial output. It threatens to turn their hard-won wisdom into a commodity, undermining their ability to command the premium rates their experience deserves and, on a deeper level, challenging the legacy of human-centric knowledge and storytelling they’ve spent a lifetime building.
In other words, we might be tempted by the siren call of an easy out—turning our authentic voices and skills into artificial writing in the hope of making numbers go up. We don’t have to. I’ve gathered a ton of fact and data to explain what the rot concept is, how it will impact us, and straightforward strategies to be prepared for all eventualities.
Stay tuned; in the next newsletter entry, I’ll explain exactly what the concept and the problem are.
If you found this helpful, you can instantly get the complete, beautifully illustrated 4,000-word white paper report, The AI Rot Economy, with all my research and predictions. Download your copy here for just $15.
Nope, I won't succumb to AI use. And now I can tell when others use it. It's like a template, and at first I'd be saying (to myself) wow, they really are smart! Then I'd slowly realize they were using AI. Many people are using it now. I hadn't thought about the 'flooding the zone' which is also being used by some political parties of late. It is a total nuisance bc one has to decide which 'noise' to listen to. I'm just going to clunk along, writing my weekly posts, continue to stay on lookout for interesting topics that might interest my readers. And to hell with it, haha.
On Medium, I've been including a "Not written using AI' label for a few years now. I've used Grammarly for years to catch spelling errors. Its "suggestions" are generally stupid. I ignore them. And it really, really, really hates the word "really." I never got into the habit on Substack of labeling my work that way, but I think most of my readers are aware I don't use it.
The only use I see for generative AI in writing is for English as a Second Language students who can't afford in-person teaching, but I would hope they'll find a way to afford that ASAP, so as to avoid the awfulness of AI slop.
Will Lockett and Cory Doctorow have been documenting the AI bubble from a business standpoint during the past couple of years, but it's becoming more evident than ever during the last six months or so.
OpenAI recently seemed proud of itself when it said that the amount of power its upcoming data servers would consume could power all of Massachusetts. That is itself a bubble.
There are currently more than 50 lawsuits by content creators against various AI companies. Anthropic just settled one of the first ones — a $1.5 billion lawsuit (I have an article coming up about that soon).
Everyone gets to make to make their own decision about AI. I made mine a long time ago, and it's not going to change.
Thanks, Maryan, for the clear positioning on this.