The Builder's Guilt: AI saturation makes me sad

One of my plans in 2026 is to generate more original content.

In the age of AI saturation, original content is something that takes you back in time - nostalgic, almost. It’s like, you know when you’re a kid growing up and you have TV, radio and so many other forms of entertainment, but you still write your daily journal at night or listen to your favorite songs on your cassette tapes. I did for a while, until I moved on to something else that made me happy. The memories of that daily journal habit are still very fresh in my memories, sitting down with a diary and writing what was on my mind to this unknown person. The frustrations, the joy, the doubt and the dreams of better days ahead.

So in 2026 the trend that I want to set and socialize to everyone I know is the fact that you can still create things, you can share them with the world in their original true form. With all of its embellishments, all grammatically imperfect, even sentences that start with “With” and have too many commas in between them.

The bland hallucinated summaries on social media posts, the robotic dubbing on videos, the unsightly comical errors in pictures, there’s so much AI everywhere that you look online. You open any platform (e.g. X, LinkedIn, Facebook), and everybody is trying to take on some cool new AI thing. There’s probably a term AI fatigue just like there was Zoom fatigue during the pandemic. I live directly in this line of tension. During the day, I help build enterprise-scale systems that benefit users by automating the mundane. I believe in that mission and have spent my career trying to use technology to make people’s lives better. But personally? I miss the mundane acts of taking the time to introspect whether the data I’m looking at and making sense of is accurate. That makes me think deeply and reflect. It was a breather between everything that moved fast. I grab my coffee, open a page, make sense of the data I’m presented with and learn something new everyday. It’s a conflict that I think many of us are feeling: we want the efficiency that AI brings but don’t want to lose the human emoting tied to what we produce. This drives me to think a lot about the cognitive overload of how fast everything is happening could be causing us to not have time to see how much high-accuracy AI and the quality of it is where a bright future exists.

This personal conflict makes me wonder where we are headed as a society. When I was a kid, you know, when other people were older, they were like “Oh, you shouldn’t watch TV. You should go out and play. You should get some physical activity. Don’t waste your time as a couch potato and just consume”. When I was a college student, it was like “Don’t be on the computer all the time, don’t play video games, explore nature. Go to the beach or get some fresh air.”. Well, I grew up near a beach. That one probably doesn’t apply to me as it was more of “don’t go to the beach and waste your time”. You get the drift.

That was the type of culture that I grew up in where advice from mom, dad, friends, family or even random strangers was free advice. Growing up is a fact of life. So here I am, in my middle aged mostly grown adult life - not too old - but when I see a proliferation of great pictures, amazing videos, so much writing everywhere I turn around, I start doubting if this wasn’t fully the work of a human brain. Creative work may have been augmented by AI, but it is not something that was in its purest form created with love.

So moving forward, I’m going to try my best to write content that is written by me, not by some bot. I did that in a post last week where I wrote everything myself. While editing it and proofreading it, it was tempting to feed the whole thing into Gemini or ChatGPT, but I chose not to. That felt very empowering, that I can still own my thoughts and how they are written down. One of the things that I plan to do is maybe use a voice notes app to record my voice and then have that put into my draft document, capturing my raw flow of thought before I have written a single word. Heck, I may even start a video blog or a podcast now that I think of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to use technology to make my life easier, as well as use that technology to make everyone’s life easier. I don’t think I will be using AI to generate fake stuff and just post it as is. There are so many AI detectors and websites now trying to make money by “humanizing” AI content, but I think the future lies in real world experiences that leverage technology to power it. Technology will make our life easier to live, but you still have to “live”. If you can see something, you can touch something, you feel emotions that move you, that is going to make people more happy than an endless doom scroll on Tiktok or Instagram or YouTube shorts. Attention spans have become so short for everyone who’s consuming digital content visually. I anticipate libraries may become cool again, I know I visited one recently. For written content online as well as newer self-published books that have come out, sometimes I cannot distinguish between a really genuine person versus a forced funny AI bot - if they’re really thoughtful or funny and if they meant what they wrote or not. It is harder and harder every day to figure this out.

So if you can’t figure out what is real and what is fake, and if you cannot consume this content that appears to be AI augmented, then one additional thing to do is take your “breather” in real life. Accept the fact that more AI noise may come and move on. That’s just me being me in my own space. You do you! You know, go out and enjoy, meet friends, meet family, go see the mountain, see the sunrise, go to the beach, find your safe space that gives you peace, happiness and joy. Yes, you will still have your phone with you. Yes, you may want to check the news or scroll through your social media. Yes, you may want to consume to stay updated.

All of that is true, but just the fact that long form blogs, long articles, opinionated takes can coexist with the AI made viral in content like pictures, videos and even “summaries” or “list of things” is a very interesting space for how you define QUALITY. Personally, I am going to start 2026 with my attempt to stick to original writing on my blog. It may seem touching a fine balance between advocating for how efficient accurate high-trust AI can make the world better, but also choose to write my thoughts in prose. But my Sony Walkman and cassette tapes bring a certain nostalgia that I cherish. Every word I type, I feel good.

Update January 31, 10:00 PM PST: An earlier version of this post referred to AI “slop”, which can have various connotations based on your context. AI saturation of blog content, opinion pieces, video and audio for its viral nature was the intent. The post has since been updated to use word “AI saturation” instead.