Welcome To Vibe Content

We used to ask, “Is this good?”

Now we ask, “Did a human make this?”
The tools exist… all of them.
Text, images, audio, video… short form, long form, snackable, scrollable, shopable.
And yes… generative.

Anyone with a prompt and a pulse can make something.

So we’ve entered the age of suspicion.
Not about what was made, but about how it came to be.
It may be a new class of content that doesn’t beg for your rational judgment, but your emotional download.
In the early days of music sampling, purists screamed: “That’s not music. They’re just copying and pasting.” 
Now? Sampling is canon… it’s the language of modern music.
In publishing, we’ve long accepted that most speeches, op-eds and books were touched (or fully written) by someone other than the name on the cover.
An editor… a ghost writer… a comms team.

But something new is happening.

Scroll through LinkedIn and you’ll see it.
Less commentary on the idea… more interrogation of the process.

“Was this AI?”“What prompt did you use?”“Which tool?”

Even my own posts spark these kinds of comments… not about the insight itself but whether I made it “by hand.”

We’re not just consuming content anymore… we’re reverse-engineering it.
That’s a fundamental shift in context.
We don’t just read or watch to learn and grow.
We read or watch to decode… to dissect.
To see if the human is still there.
Or if the whole thing is just a well-dressed generative hallucination.

Here’s the tension… 

I’ve been writing in this rhythm, with this structure, for close to six years.
I stole the formatting from Seth Godin (short and punchy) and iterated on it (can business content sound and be more poetic and have a different flow?).
I wanted it to be punchy… prose-first… scroll-stopping.

But now the machines do it too.

Not because they invented it.
Because they ingested it (and not just from me).
My writing (and the writing of thousands/millions of others) is part of their models.
From my side, that’s twenty-plus years of articles, interviews, podcasts, books and more.

So when someone uses AI and ends up with something that sounds like me, it’s not copying… it’s a form of reflection.

We’ve reached a moment where your content style can be absorbed, replicated and posted back to you… without ever being stolen.
At least not in the traditional sense.
Because here’s where it gets legally (and ethically) murky…
If my voice (the structure, tone and pacing I’ve crafted for decades) now lives in a model that millions of people use… what part of that belongs to me when the output is always different?

Who owns this?

This is where copyright and IP law are colliding with a completely new kind of authorship.
Not “original” in the classic sense.
But also not quite derivative… and certainly not accidental.
If you trained a machine on thousands of hours of Steven Spielberg and it made a movie with Spielberg pacing and Spielberg lighting and Spielberg storytelling (but no actual Spielberg) what do you call that?

Right now, we’re in the gray zone.

The models ingest.
The creators give prompts, tweaks, remixes and get outputs.
And the courts?
They’re not built for this pace (or even how to think about it)… not yet (but when… and are they even talking about it?).

Which means we’re going to spend the next few years fumbling through what attribution, authorship and ownership mean in a world where everyone can create without “creating.”

I’ve been thinking about a line from a recent New York Times article titled, How A Video Studio Embraced AI And Stormed The Internet, on Doron Dor and his AI-generated video studio:
“A.I. artists like Mr. Dor argue that the tools are actually a purer form of expression, offering the most direct link between the artist’s brain and the end result.” 
That hits.
Not everything needs a full crew, a shoot, a post-production workflow or a team of editors.
If you can vibe it (think it, say it, type it), you can build it.
That’s the promise of vibe coding…
This in-between layer of creation where you don’t need to “code” the thing yourself… you just need to feel it clearly enough to direct it.
It’s not cheating… it’s expressing… it is a form of expression.

Welcome to Vibe Content.

Vibe Content is where the feel of the final output matters more than the format.
Where how it resonates emotionally beats how it was made technically.
It’s not about craft in the traditional sense… it’s about signal, tone, rhythm and reaction.
You don’t need the tools or training (the system’s got you covered), just a clear sense of what you want to say and how you want people to feel.
Whether made by hand or by prompt, vibe content wins only if it lands.

We used to think content was content.

But it’s bifurcating (a term that Ann Handley floated my way).
There’s the content that solves a task… fast, clean, done.
And then there’s the content that says something… about you, your brand, your taste, your voice.

One is signal… the other is signature.

AI is going to dominate the signal stuff in the near-term.
Your inbox replies, your meeting notes, your next “just checking in” email, your text messages.
It’ll know what to say and how you’ve said it before.
It’ll finish your sentences before you start thinking.

And honestly? Good. That’s not where the magic was anyway.

The signature work?
That’s still human… still messy… still full of choices and risks and doubt.
Still worth doing.
Still, AI is getting pretty good at that too (but will always need all the vibes)

This might be the moment where writing becomes more like math.

We’ll still do it… but we’ll also let the machine carry the ones and balance the equations (thanks, calculator!).
The question isn’t: Will AI replace writing?
The question is: What kind of writing are we even talking about?

The truth is, we’re still early. 

This is the phase where people care about how the content got made.
Where prompts and plugins and provenance still matter.
Or, as my good friend Ron Tite said to me: “There is still a ton of work to make the output match the vision. It’s just a different type of work.”

But not for long.

The market won’t care who or what made the vibe in a Vibe Content world.
It will care if it moves you.

Soon, the only question that will matter is: Do you like it or not? (same as it ever was).

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