Stand outside on a quiet morning and listen. If you’re lucky, and the conditions are right, you’ll hear something remarkable: Birdsong.
Then the crows arrive.
One crow is fine. Two is manageable. But crows are social, and they’re loud, and when the conditions suit them they multiply. What was a varied, interesting soundscape becomes a single relentless caw.
The individual voices aren’t gone. They’re just impossible to hear.
I’ve started calling a certain kind of LLM-assisted content creation CAW (Computer-Aided Writing). It’s a portmanteau that, once it formed, wouldn’t let go. And like the crows, CAW isn’t malicious. It’s just doing what it does when the conditions allow it.
It’s worth being clear about what that actually is. An LLM isn’t thinking. It’s predicting, producing the next most statistically likely word given everything it’s been trained on. Which means the output will always converge toward the average of what already exists. The homogenisation isn’t a bug, or even a misuse. It’s the mechanism.
The conditions that unleash it are algorithms that reward frequency. Post more, stay visible, keep up. I’ve written about where that leads before. It isn’t good. And if keeping up is the goal, CAW is the obvious tool. Fast, frictionless, and it produces something that looks, at a glance, like content.
The problem is what the tool is being asked to do.
When enough people use the same tools, prompted by the same anxiety, optimising for the same algorithmic signals, the overall soundscape changes. Like the proverbial frog in slowly heating water, nobody quite notices until the moment they do. Individual voices don’t disappear exactly. They just get harder to find underneath a kind of uniform professionalism, posts that could have come from anywhere and therefore feel like they came from nowhere.
And you don’t have to be a writer to feel this. You don’t have to be consciously tracking the homogenisation. Most people scrolling LinkedIn or reading their email on a Tuesday morning couldn’t tell you why the feed feels flat, why nothing quite snags their attention the way it used to. They’re not identifying the crows. They’re just noticing, somewhere below conscious thought, that the birdsong has gone quiet. The whole environment becomes less worth stopping for, and nobody can quite explain why.
I’ve been thinking about this partly because my own use of these tools came about as a reaction to noticing the problem. Not generating content at volume, but mapping my voice, establishing in some detail what I actually sound like, what I reach for instinctively, what I’m trying to say and how. Go back through my blogs over the past couple of years and you can see the guidelines developing in real time, the voice shifting and sharpening as the project picked up and stalled and picked up again. The output, such as it is, is a set of guidelines that help me write more like myself, not less. It’s been an ongoing project, with periods of real attention and longer stretches where it sat on the back burner.
Which is a different thing entirely. Though I’ll admit, I was already swimming in the same warm water when I started noticing the temperature.
CAD (Computer-Aided Design) didn’t replace architects or engineers. It gave them better tools to realise what they were already imagining. CAW could do the same. Most people are using it to keep up with the crows instead.
Jonathan Pay - email marketing consultant 