Updated May 28, 2026
Walk Away or Dance: Your AI Content Crossroads
With AI in the room you get two good moves: walk away from the channel or learn to direct the machine. The mediocre middle is where all the slop comes from.
Hello, hello! 👋🏻
Seth Godin wrote a piece a while back that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. He called it Walk Away or Dance.
The idea: with AI in the room, you really have two good options. Walk away from the work entirely, or learn to dance with the machine. What you can’t do is stand in the doorway.
That’s exactly where most marketers are standing.
Stuck in the messy middle, cranking out mediocre AI slop that satisfies no one. Not the reader. Not the boss. Not even the person who hit publish.
So why does everybody get stuck there?
When I work with my students, it almost always comes down to one of two things. They don’t actually care about the channel they’re posting in, or they never built a real content process. Usually both.
And here’s what I tell them, even though it lands like a brick: if you don’t care about a channel, you’re going to make slop in it. Every time. So the real question isn’t “how do I make this better with AI.” It’s “should I even be here?”
That’s a rough conversation to bring to your boss, though. The boss who wants you on Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and X. All of them. Amazing content, every week, no excuses.
While you’re a marketing team of one.
I get why people freeze.
What slop actually looks like
People think slop means AI, but that’s only half of it.
AI slop is the generic, templated stuff that screams “a robot made this.” You know the tells. “Delve” and “unlock” and “game-changing” sprinkled on every paragraph. No personality. No point of view. No risk taken anywhere. And it floods the feed until your whole market reads like static.
Human slop is just as bad. Sometimes worse, because nobody can blame the software. Lazy listicles. The same recycled industry take everyone’s already posted. Safe, boring, forgettable, written by a person who’d checked out three paragraphs ago.
The internet’s full of both. And it’s piling up faster every month.
Three ways to dance (and make stuff worth reading)
Dancing isn’t “use more AI.” It’s changing your job from typist to director. Here’s how I run it.
1. Be the creative director
Let AI throw ten concepts at the wall. You pick the one that’s actually interesting, then you add the insight and the taste that only you have. That’s the whole shift right there. You stop being the person who types and start being the person who decides. It’s the same move I keep coming back to in my full AI content marketing playbook. AI drafts. You direct.
2. Feed it what only you know
Give the model your real numbers. Your case studies. The exact thing a customer said on a call last Tuesday. AI can’t hallucinate the stuff that lives only in your business. Proprietary detail is the one thing it can’t fake, so make it the thing your content runs on.
3. Run the gut check before you publish
Ask one question: does this piece carry any judgment, any insight, any risk? If the answer’s no, you’re a typist with expensive software. Put your take in. Pick an angle. Be willing to be wrong out loud. That discomfort you feel? That’s the part the machine can’t do.
Walk away, dance, or stand there
So picture three lanes you could be in.
The first is walking away. Going fully artisanal, human hands only, no AI anywhere near it. It’s slow and it costs more, and for the right piece it’s exactly the right call.
The second is dancing. You become AI’s creative director. You bring the judgment and the taste, it brings the speed and the volume, and together you ship more good work than either of you could alone.
The third is the mediocre middle, and that’s where all the slop comes from. AI does the thinking, you do the copy-pasting, and the finished thing doesn’t read like it was made for anyone in particular. Because it wasn’t.
Which lane are you in right now?
- Walking away, going fully artisanal
- Dancing, directing the AI
- Still parked in the middle
- Depends on the project, if I’m being real
The only way to lose is to keep standing still while everyone else dances.
I’ve spent a lot of hours lately sitting down with team members to rebuild their content processes, and the pattern never changes. The people who win aren’t the ones with the slickest tools. They’re the ones who picked a lane and actually committed to it.
So pick one. Walk away or dance. Just get out of the middle.
Until next read,
Alec
Standing in the middle? Let’s get you into a lane.
Every Friday I send one email to marketers who want to stop making slop and start directing it. You’ll get the exact “creative director” moves I run on my own content, the proprietary-data trick that AI can’t fake, and the channels I’d quietly walk away from if I were you. Pick a lane with me.